The abduction of modernity

By Henry C K Liu, Asia Times, 9 July 2003 to 12 August
2003

Part 1: The race toward barbarism

The United States defines its global “war on terrorism” as
a defensive effort to protect its way of life, beyond attacks from
enemies with alien cultural and religious motives, to attacks from
those who reject modernity itself. This definition is derived from the
views of historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islamic culture at
Princeton University, who traces Islamic opposition to the West beyond
hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even
countries, to rejection of Western civilization for what it is. To
Lewis, Western civilization stands for modernity. This anti-modernity
attitude, he warns, is what lends support to the ready use of terror
by Islamic fundamentalists.

Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
end of the Cold War will bring neither peace nor worldwide acceptance
of liberal democracy. Huntington rejects Francis Fukuyama's
prematurely optimistic “end of history” theme that the
collapse of communism means Western civilization is destined to spread
as people elsewhere seek the benefits of technology, wealth, and
personal freedom it offers. Instead, because technology has been
reserved for exploitation, wealth obscenely maldistributed, and
freedom selectively denied to the powerless, narrow ideological
conflict will transform into conflicts among people with different
religions, values, ethnicities, and historical memories. These
cultural factors define civilizations. Nations will increasingly base
alliances on common civilization rather than common ideology; and wars
will tend to occur along the fault lines between major civilizations.

Huntington points out that embracing materialist science, industrial
production, technical education, rootless urbanization, and
capitalistic trade does not mean the rest of the world will embrace
the culture of the West. On the contrary, he argues that economic
growth is likely to increase the aspiration for cultural sovereignty,
breeding a new commitment to the values, customs, traditions, and
religions of native cultures. The struggle is not capitalism against
communism, but backward civilization against modern civilization.

The fault in both these views is the assumption that modernity is an
exclusive characteristic of the West. On the surface, such views
appear self-evident, since science and technology have been the
enabling factors behind Western ascendance and dominance. But the
“modern world” can be viewed as a brief aberration on the
long path of human destiny, a brief period of a few centuries when
narcissistic Western thinkers mistake technological development as
moral progress in human civilization. Many barbaric notions, racism
being the most obvious, appear under the label of modernity,
rationalized by a barbaric doctrine of pseudo-science. The West takes
advantage of the overwhelming power it has derived from its barbaric
values to set itself up as a superior civilization. The West views its
technical prowess as a predatory license for intolerance of the values
and traditions of other advanced cultures.

Chinese civilization has weathered successive occupation by barbaric
invaders, all of whom as rulers saw fit to adopt Chinese civilization
for their own benefit and contributed to the further development of
the culture they had invaded and subsequently adopted. The history of
the West's interaction with the rest of the world has been
culturally evangelistic, to suppress and encroach on unfamiliar
cultures Westerners arbitrarily deem inferior, often based on
self-satisfied ignorance. Until confronted by Western imperialism,
China might have faced military conquests, but Chinese civilization
had never been under attack. Barbaric invaders came to gain access to
Chinese culture, not to destroy it. The West is unique in its
destructive ethnocentricity. Under the domination of the West, Chinese
or other non-Western intellectuals who do not speak or read Western
languages are considered illiterate and ignorant, while Western
“scholars”, including the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, who do not speak or read Chinese or other non-Western
languages have written erudite books on Chinese and other non-Western
culture.

Gunpowder was invented around the 4th century in China by Taoist
alchemist Ko Hong while seeking an elixir for immortality. It is the
height of Taoist irony that the search for an elixir for immortality
only yields a substance that ends life abruptly. Gunpowder would not
be used in warfare in China until the 10th century, first in
incendiary rockets called feihuo (flying fire), forerunner of
today's intercontinental ballistic missiles. Explosive grenades
would first be employed by armies of the Song Dynasty in 1161 against
Jurchens (Nuzhen), ancestors of modern-day Manchurians.

In Chinese dynastic culture, the use of firearms in war was considered
cowardly and therefore not exploited by honorable warriors of
self-respect. Firearms would not develop in dynastic China, not
because of the absence of know-how, but because their use had been
culturally circumscribed as not being appropriate for true warriors.

In the history of human progress, willful rejection of many
technological inventions is traceable to cultural preference. This is
the basis for concluding that the technological militarism of the West
is of barbaric roots and that a civilization built on military power
remains barbaric, the reverse of modernity, notwithstanding the guise
of technology.

The oldest picture in the world of a gun and a grenade is on a painted
silk banner found at Dunhuang, dating to the mid-10th century, that
came to be in the possession of Musee Guimet in Paris in modern
times. The museum on Place d’Iena was founded by French
industrialist Emile Guimet, a 19th-century Asian-art collector from
Lyon. On the silk banner, demons of Mara the Temptress, an evil
goddess, are shown trying to harm the meditating Buddha and to
distract him from his pursuit of enlightenment, with a proto-gun in
the form of a fire lance and a proto-grenade in the form of a
palm-size fire-bomb. The fact that these weapons are shown to be used
only by evil demons illustrates the distasteful attitude of the
ancient Chinese toward firearms.

Crossbows, known in Chinese as nu, have a shorter range than
double-curved longbows and are slower in firing. But they became
devastatingly accurate after a grid sight to guide their aim was
invented 23 centuries ago by Prince Liu Chong of the imperial house of
the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220).

Crossbows were first used 28 centuries ago in the Spring and Autumn
Period (Chunqiu 770-481 BC) when their employment in the hands of the
infantry neutralized the traditional superiority of war chariots. The
use of crossbows thus changed the rules of warfare and the balance of
power in the political landscape of ancient China, favoring those
states with large sheren (commoner) infantry forces over those with
powerful chariot-owning militant guizu (aristocrats).

The earliest unification of China by the Legalist Qin Dynasty (221-207
BC), whose unifying ruler was an antagonist of fragmented aristocratic
feudalism, was not independent of the geopolitical impact of crossbow
technology.

History records that in 209 BC, the Second Emperor (Er Shi, reigned
209-207 BC) of the Qin Dynasty, son of the unifying Qin Origin Emperor
(Qin Shihuangdi, reigned 246-210 BC), who fought 26 years of
continuous war to unify all under the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), which
subsequently lasted only 14 years before collapsing, kept a crossbow
regiment of 50,000 archers.

Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian, author of the classic Records of the
Historian (Shi Ji), wrote in 108 BC that a member of the Han royalty,
the prince of Liang Xiao (Liang Xiao Wang), was in charge of an
arsenal with several hundred thousand crossbows in 157 BC.

Two working crossbows from China, dating from the 11th century AD, one
capable of repeat firing, came to be in the modern-day collection of
the Simon Archery Foundation in Manchester Museum at the University of
Manchester, England.

Most triggers and sights used in crossbows in China were manufactured
by master craftsmen who signed their metal products with inscribed
marks and dates. Shen Gua (1031-94), renowned Bei Song Dynasty
(Northern Song 960-1127) scientist cum historian on Chinese science
and technology, referred to his frustration over his inability to date
accurately an 11th-century excavation, upon finding on a crossbow
mechanism the inscription “stock by Yu Shih and bow by Chang
Rou”, but with no accompanying dates.

Even in 10th century BC, production of crossbows in China had already
involved a sophisticated system of separation of manufacturing of
parts and mass assembly of final products.

Crossbows were last used in war in China by the Qing Dynasty army in
1900, with tragic inadequacy, against the invading armies of eight
allied European powers with more deadly firearms.

The ancient Greeks employed crossbows successfully at Syracuse in 397
BC. After the fall of the Roman Empire, crossbows reappeared in Europe
only after the 10th century. They were used at the Battle of Hastings
in 1066 by William the Conqueror.

The Second Lateran Council of 1139 condemned crossbows, together with
usury, simony, clerical marriage and concubinage. Their use was banned
under the anathema of the Church, except for use against infidels. The
ban on crossbows was a position of moral righteousness yet to be taken
by Christendom in modern times on the use of nuclear arms and other
weapons of mass destruction.

Richard, Coeur de Lion (1157-1199), mostly absentee king of England
(1189-99) and less-than-successful hero of the Crusades, took many
crossbows on his Third Crusade in 1190. Hernando Cortes (1485-1547),
Spanish conquistador, used the crossbow as one of his main weapons in
subjugating Mexico in the 16th century.

In medieval warfare, the rules of European chivalry required, as those
of dynastic Chinese martial arts did, that honorable combat be
personal and bodily. Arrows were considered cowardly by medieval
Europeans, as firearms were by dynastic Chinese up to the 19th
century. The use of bows and arrows was stooped to only by those
outside of the socio-military establishment, the likes of outlawed
English yeomen of the 12th century, such as Robin Hood and his chief
archer, Little John, legendary folk heroes of English ballads. Another
famous 13th-century archer was the legendary Swiss patriot William
Tell, whose story would be made popular by Friedrich von
Schiller's drama and later by Gioacchino Antonio Rossini's
popular opera.

European knights, when prepared to suffer calculated losses, were able
to survive slow-firing enemy crossbows with limited range. In
sufficient numbers, the horsemen were able to decimate in full gallop
an unprotected line of much-despised enemy crossbow-men. However, they
were not able to overcome fast-firing longbows with long range.

Two millennia after the invention of crossbows in China, the Battle of
Crecy of the Hundred Years' War, which took place on August 26,
1346, first demonstrated the effectiveness of Edward III's English
archers, composed mostly of newly recruited, socially shunned yeomen
with longbows, against the respectable armored French knights of
Philip VI.

Similarly, the Battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415, decisively
confirmed the obsolescence of hitherto invincible French aristocratic
knights on horseback. In opposition, English yeomen, commoner
foot-soldiers, members of a class unappreciated by their social
betters in their home society, applied with glory in war a despised
killing tool designed for illegal poaching in peace. Armed with a
fresh military application of ignoble longbow technology, the socially
inferior English yeomen in the form of simple unarmored
infantry-archers, proved their battlefield supremacy to the socially
superior French aristocrats in the form of powerfully armored mounted
knights.

The Battle of Agincourt marked the end of the age of chivalry and
announced the obsolescence of its stylized methods of warfare. It also
heralded the beginning of a period in which the sovereign would look
for military support from the gentry of his realm rather than
traditionally from the aristocracy. This gave rise to the resulting
political implication that henceforth war would have to be fought for
national purpose or religious conviction rather than for settling
private feuds among royalties.

In William Shakespeare's Henry V, the central scene of which
features the Battle of Agincourt, the most glorious in English
history, King Henry addresses his yeomen soldiers in a famous
nationalistic exultation:

Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeomen,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot;
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’

After the battle scene, Shakespeare (1564-1616) has King Henry recount
the French dead:

The names of those their nobles that lie dead:
Charles Delabreth, High Constable of France;
The Master of the Cross-bows, Lord Rambures …

In ancient Chinese warfare, the code of honorable martial conduct
required that combat be personal, bodily and frontal. Combatants were
organized according to rank, as per all other social activities in a
class-conscious and rigidly hierarchical society. Jiangjun (generals)
were pitted against jiangjun, captains against captains and foot
soldiers against foot soldiers. Social segregation was reflected in
the proverb: “Earthenware does not deserve collision with
porcelain.”

Expertise in corporeal martial skill was so highly prized that
jiangjun were frequently expected to engage personally in one-on-one
combat with their opposing counterparts. Battles were sometimes won or
lost depending on the outcome of high-ranking personal duels under the
watchful eyes of troops on each side. By Tang time in the 7th century,
however, the cult of martial chivalry in which individual valor
determined the outcome of battles already had become only a legend of
the past. Firepower was still considered cowardly. And the use of
firearms was not acceptable to proud warriors as respectable members
of the social elite. Until influenced in modern times by popular
Hollywood films on the American Wild West, Chinese children playing
war would prefer swordfights to gunfights.

Gunpowder remained unknown in the West until the late 10th
century. However, Europeans abandoned outmoded rules of chivalry after
the Middle Ages and enthusiastically incorporated firearms and
artillery into the lexicon of their military arts after the late 15th
century. In contrast, thanks to the Confucian aversion to
technological progress, Chinese military planners did not modernize
their martial code, basing foreign policy on the principle of
civilized benevolence. They continued to suppress development of
firearms as immoral and dishonorable up to the 19th century, much to
China's misfortune.

As a result, European armies arrived in China in the 19th century with
superior firearms. They consistently and repeatedly scored decisive
victories with their small but better-armed expeditionary forces over
the numerically superior yet technologically backward, sword-wielding
Chinese army of the decrepit Qing Dynasty (1636-1911).

China's most influential revolutionary, Mao Zedong, proclaimed in
modern times his famous dictum: “Political power comes from the
barrel of a gun.” He was in fact condemning the obsolete values
of Confucianism (ru jia) as much as stating a truism in barbaric
modern realpolitik.

Confucian ethics notwithstanding, morality and honor failed to save
China from Western imperialism, because morality and honor require
observation from both opponents. It was not a clash of civilizations,
but a clash between civilization and barbarism. Militarism is a race
toward barbarism camouflaged by technology as modernity.

The Boxers Uprising of 1900, the Chinese name for which is Yihetuan
(Righteous Harmony Brigade), was an extremist xenophobic movement. It
was encouraged as a chauvinistic instrument for domestic politics by
the decrepit court of the Qing Dynasty, dominated by the
self-indulging, reactionary Dowager Empress (Cixi Taihou,
1838-1908). The Boxer Uprising was used by the Dowager Empress as a
populist counterweight to abort the budding “100 Days”
elitist reform movement of 1869, led by conservative reformist Kang
Youwei (1858-1927) around the young monarch, the weak Emperor Guangxu
(reigned 1875-98), belatedly and defensively advocating modernization
for China.

The members of Yihetuan, in a burst of chauvinistic frenzy, rejected
the use of modern and therefore foreign firearms in favor of
traditional broadswords. They relied on protection against enemy
bullets from Taoist amulets, their faith in which would remain
unshaken in the face of undeniable empirical evidence provided by
hundreds of thousands of falling comrades shot by Western gunfire. The
term Boxer would be coined by bewildered Europeans whose modern
pragmatism would fill them with a superficial superiority complex,
justified on narrow grounds, over an ancient culture that stubbornly
clung to the irrational power of faith, in defiance of reason.

Historians often trace the source of national predicaments to
particular decisions made by leaders based on personal character,
rather than to structural conditions of institutions. This convenient
emphasis on personal political errors at the expense of deterministic
institutional structure tends to nurture speculations that with wiser
decisions, a socio-economic-political order trapped inside an obsolete
institutional system would not necessarily be doomed to collapse under
the strain of its own contradictions. Such speculations are hard to
verify, since it can be argued that bad political decisions by faulty
leaders are not independent of a nation's institutional
defects. The penchant of the sole remaining superpower to resort to
overwhelming force against those not willing to bend to its will may
well be an institutional march from modernity back toward barbarism.

Ironically, the Boxers Uprising so discredited the public image of the
stubbornly reactionary Qing court that, within a decade after its
outbreak, the democratic revolution of Dr Sun Yat-sen succeeded in
1911 in overthrowing the three-century-old Qing Dynasty, despite the
effective reactionary suppression of progressive monarchist reform
efforts in the dynasty's last phase, or perhaps because of
it. Extremist reactionaries, in their eagerness to be gravediggers for
progressive reformers, usually become instead unwitting midwives for
revolutionary radicals. The Taoist concept of the curative potential
of even deadly poison was again demonstrated by the pathetic
phenomenon of the Boxers Uprising.

Thus a case can be made that extreme fundamentalist opposition to the
West may be the midwife for modernization of Islamic civilization. The
capitalistic West nurtured and used Islamic fundamentalism as an
antidote against communism in the oil regions of the Middle East
during the Cold War, the same way it had nurtured and used fascism
during the Great Depression. The antidote proves to be more lethal to
the capitalistic West.

Western military prowess, with its arsenal of smart bombs and weapons
of mass destruction ready for deployment to impose its will on others,
is not a march toward modernity, but a retreat toward barbarism. A
civilization built on militarization of the peace remains a barbaric
civilization. What Western militarism has done is to abduct modernity
as synonymous with Western civilization, depriving human civilization
of an evolving process of cultural diversity. The effect of this
abduction of modernity had been profound and comprehensive.

The West is not the only guilty party in history, only the most
recent. Chinese civilization during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC) took
a great step forward toward forging a unified nation and culture, but
in the process lost much of the richness of its ancient, local
traditions and rendered many details of its fragmented past
incomprehensible to posterity. Universality and standardization,
ingredients of progress, are mortal enemies of particularity and
variety, components of tradition. Human civilization deserves a richer
vision of modernity than that offered by the West. Until modernization
is divorced from Westernization, non-Western civilizations will
continue to resist modernization.

Tu Weiming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and director
of the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, wrote:
“Hegel, [Karl] Marx and Max Weber all shared the ethos that,
despite all its shortcomings, the modern West informed by the
Enlightenment mentality was the only arena where the true difference
for the rest of the world could be made. Confucian East Asia, Islamic
Middle East, Hindu India, or Buddhist Southeast Asia was on the
receiving end of this process. Eventually, modernization as
homogenization would make cultural diversity inoperative, if not
totally meaningless. It was inconceivable that Confucianism or, for
that matter, any other non-Western spiritual traditions could exert a
shaping influence on the modernizing process. The development from
tradition to modernity was irreversible and inevitable.”

Tu suggests that, in the global context, what some of the most
brilliant minds in the modern West assumed to be self-evidently true
turned out to be parochial. In the rest of the world and, arguably, in
Western Europe and North America, the anticipated clear transition
from tradition to modernity never occurred. As a norm, traditions
continue to make their presence in modernity and, indeed, the
modernizing process itself is constantly shaped by a variety of
cultural forms rooted in distinct traditions. The recognition of the
relevance of radical otherness to one's own self-understanding of
the 18th century seems more applicable to the current situation in the
global community than the inattention to any challenges to the modern
Western mindset of the 19th century and the first half of the
20th. For example, the outstanding Enlightenment thinkers such as
Francois Arouet de Voltaire, Gottfried Leibniz and Jean Jacques
Rousseau took China as their major reference society and Confucianism
as their major reference culture. It seems that toward the 21st
century, the openness of the 18th century, as contrasted with the
exclusivity of the 19th century, may provide a better guide for the
dialogue of civilizations.

According to Professor Tu, in light of the ill-conceived hypothesis of
the “coming clash of civilizations, the need for civilizational
dialogues and for exploring a global ethic is more compelling. Among
the Enlightenment values advocated by the French Revolution,
fraternity, the functional equivalent of community, has received scant
attention among modern political theorists. The preoccupation with
fixing the relationship between the individual and the state since
[John] Locke's treatises on government is, of course, not the full
picture of modern political thought; but it is undeniable that
communities, notably the family, have been ignored as irrelevant in
the mainstream of Western political discourse.”

In Tu's view, East Asian modernity under the influence of
Confucian traditions suggests an alternative model to Western
modernism:

(1) Government leadership in a market economy is not only necessary
but is also desirable. The doctrine that government is a necessary
evil and that the market in itself can provide an “invisible
hand” for ordering society is antithetical to modern experience
in either the West or the East. A government that is responsive to
public needs, responsible for the welfare of the people and
accountable to society at large is vitally important for the creation
and maintenance of order.

(2) Although law is essential as the minimum requirement for social
stability, “organic solidarity” can only result from the
implementation of humane rites of interaction. The civilized mode of
conduct can never be communicated through coercion. Exemplary teaching
as a standard of inspiration invites voluntary participation. Law
alone cannot generate a sense of shame to guide civilized behavior. It
is the ritual act that encourages people to live up to their own
aspirations.

(3) Family as the basic unit of society is the locus from which the
core values are transmitted. The dyadic relationships within the
family, differentiated by age, gender, authority, status, and
hierarchy, provide a richly textured natural environment for learning
the proper way of being human. The principle of reciprocity, as a
two-way traffic of human interaction, defines all forms of
human-relatedness in the family. Age and gender, potentially two of
the most serious gaps in the primordial environment of the human
habitat, are brought into a continuous flow of intimate sentiments of
human care.

(4) Civil society flourishes not because it is an autonomous arena
above the family and beyond the state. Its inner strength lies in its
dynamic interplay between family and state. The image of the family as
a microcosm of the state and the ideal of the state as an enlargement
of the family indicate that family stability is vitally important for
the body politic and a vitally important function of the state is to
ensure organic solidarity of the family. Civil society provides a
variety of mediating cultural institutions that allow for a fruitful
articulation between family and state. The dynamic interplay between
the private and public enables the civil society to offer diverse and
enriching resources for human flourishing.

(5) Education ought to be the civil religion of society. The primary
purpose of education is character-building. Intent on the cultivation
of the full person, schools should emphasize ethical as well as
cognitive intelligence. Schools should teach the art of accumulating
“social capital” through communication. In addition to the
acquisition of knowledge and skills, schooling must be congenial to
the development of cultural competence and appreciation of spiritual
values.

(6) Since self-cultivation is the root for the regulation of family,
governance of state, and peace under heaven, the quality of life of a
particular society depends on the level of self-cultivation of its
members. A society that encourages self-cultivation as a necessary
condition for human flourishing is a society that cherishes
virtue-centered political leadership, mutual exhortation as a communal
way of self-realization, the value of the family as the proper home
for learning to be human, civility as the normal pattern of human
interaction and, education as character-building.

Tu acknowledges that it is far-fetched to suggest that these societal
ideals are fully realized in East Asia. Actually, East Asian societies
often exhibit behaviors and attitudes just the opposite of the
supposed salient features of Confucian modernity indicate. Indeed,
having been humiliated by imperialism and colonialism for decades, the
rise of East Asia, on the surface at least, blatantly displays some of
the most negative aspects of Western modernism with a vengeance:
exploitation, mercantilism, consumerism, materialism, greed, egoism
and brutal competitiveness.

Nevertheless, as the first non-Western region to become modernized,
the cultural implications of the rise of “Confucian” East
Asia are far-reaching. The modern West as informed by the
Enlightenment mentality provided the initial impetus for worldwide
social transformation. The historical reasons that prompted the
modernizing process in Western Europe and North America are not
necessarily structural components of modernity. Surely, Enlightenment
values such as instrumental rationality, liberty, rights
consciousness, due process of law, privacy and individualism are all
universalizable modern values. However, as the Confucian example
suggests, “Asian values” such as sympathy, distributive
justice, duty-consciousness, ritual, public-spiritedness and group
orientation are also universalizable modern values. Just as the former
ought to be incorporated into East Asian modernity, the latter may
turn out to be a critical and timely reference for the American way of
life.

Part 2: That old time religion

From the fall of the Roman Empire to the 15th century, Islam was the
dominant civilization outside of China. The Islamic world of this
period was more advanced, with greater wealth and a higher level of
culture than the Christian West. Islamic scholars preserved the texts
of the ancient Greek philosophers and scientists by translating them
into Arabic and Latin, which Renaissance scholars emerging from the
Dark Ages relied on for sources and scholarship on antiquity. Arabs
made path-breaking advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and
philosophy, and transmitted to the West much of what they had learned
from China. The West through the interpretation of Arab eyes
rediscovered much of Western antiquity.

Mohammed the Prophet entered Mecca in AD 630 and established Islamic
rule. The growing forces of Muslim, 121 years from that date, after
having conquered Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Persia and much of
Byzantium, decisively defeated the Tang Chinese army in 751 at the
famous Battle of Talas, between modern-day Tashkent and Lake
Balkhash. The Arab victory was aided by a branch of Muslim Tujue
(Turkic) tribes known as Karluks, who launched a surprised attack on
Tang forces from the rear. The Battle of Talas halted Chinese
expansion into Central Asia.

The Chinese refer to Arabs as Dashi, from the Syrian word Tayi or the
Persian word T’cyk. The Arabs conquered Samarkand in the 8th
century. For five centuries thereafter, Samarkand flourished under the
Omayyad Arabs as a trade center between Baghdad and Changan, the
capital of dynastic China, until advances in sea transport in the 13th
century finally rendered the Silk Route economically obsolete. Chinese
prisoners captured by Arab forces at the Battle of Talas in 751
eventually introduced the art of paper-making to Arab lands and
subsequently to Europe, but only after Arab paper-makers, jealously
guarding the secret from Europeans for five more centuries, had sold
paper to Europe at handsome profits in the interim. A process to make
paper from vegetable fiber had first been invented by Cailun in China
during the Han Dynasty in 105. The first paper mill outside of China
was established by Arabs in Samarkand six-and-a-half centuries later
in 751. The invention of paper greatly facilitated the development of
language, graphic arts and culture, first in China, then in the Arab
world, and then in the West.

The scientific and industrial revolutions vastly increased the wealth
and power of the West from the middle of the 19th century. After the
defeat of the Islamic Ottoman Empire in World War I, the Middle East
was taken over by European powers and broken up into colonies and
protectorates. Today, despite decolonization, nationalism and oil
riches, this region remains poor and underdeveloped, not because
modernity bypassed it, but because modernity arrived in the form of
neo-colonialism. Westernization in these lands has produced miserable
results, forcing the Islamic world to the conclusion that the solution
may be a renewal of the Islamic faith that reigned in the days of
their former greatness. The West derides this view as a rejection of
modernity, notwithstanding historical evidence of the Arab world
having embraced science and technology at a time when the best minds
in the West were still prisoners of the flat-Earth doctrine.

The clash-of-civilizations theme exaggerates unity in outlook, values,
ideas, and loyalties among people who share the common history and
culture that define a civilization. Modern wars have been fought
mostly within Western civilization, while easy imperialistic conquests
have been the order of the day between Western and non-Western
civilizations. Samuel P Huntington wrote: “The central
characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other
civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West.” Thus the
modernization of other civilizations is not in conflict with rejection
of Westernization. The scholar Bernard Lewis, in seeing hatred of
modernity as the main driving force in the wider context of Islamic
terrorism, is confusing modernity with Western culture.

The rejection of modernity occurs in every nation and
civilization. The history of the West, dominated by the rise of
Christianity, is strewn with wars of resistance against modernity. The
history of Christianity, the main thread of Western history, is a
continuing saga against modernity. The US “war on
terrorism” itself is a continuation of this resistance in its
emphasis on force rather than understanding. By abducting the concept
of modernity as a monopoly of the West, Western scholars obstruct true
modernity in a diverse world. Modernity is defined by the West as a
collection of Western values arbitrarily deemed universal—the
secular culture of circular rationality, materialist science,
alienating individualism, technical innovation, amoral legalism,
selective democracy and exploitative capitalism that Western
imperialism has spread worldwide in different forms and to varying
degrees. Religious fundamentalism is currently enjoying unprecedented
influence over secular politics within the United States, as
exemplified by President George W Bush's proclamation that God,
not the US constitution, told him to attack Afghanistan and
Iraq. While the separation of church and state is still a governing
tenet in the US, separation of religion and politics is non-existent.

Modernity, a new version of Rudyard Kipling's “white
man's burden” of old-fashioned imperialism, has been brought
to the world by neo-imperialism, to disarm resistance to Western
neo-imperialist encroachment. Opposition to exploitative policies and
actions of the imperialist West is dismissed as irrational hatred of
modernity. Kipling (1865-1936) confused Western materialist
advancement with moral superiority, as measured by a standard based on
virtue. Kipling's romantic portrayal of the model Englishman as
brave, honorable, conscientious and self-reliant, while popularly
accepted in the English-speaking West, would be generally rejected in
the East by those with direct exposure to the breed as being still
unwashed of animalistic instincts. The idealized image would be
recognized as being a wishful manifestation based on Kipling's
apologetic colonial mentality toward his social betters in his home
society. It is also a compensation for Kipling's own inferiority
complex derived from his love-hate relationship with the richness of
Indian culture, to which he was attracted but which he was unable to
appreciate fully because of his deep-rooted racial prejudice as a
product of Western culture.

The “white man's burden” is a world view for
justifying imperialism. The term is the name of an 1899 poem by
Kipling, the sentiments of which give insight into this world view.

In this view, non-European cultures are seen as childlike and
devilish, with people of European descent having a sacred and selfless
obligation to dominate them in perpetuity for their own good and
salvation.

The poem was originally published in a popular US magazine
(McClure's). It was written specifically to address US
isolationist sentiments after the Spanish-American War in 1898, from
which the United States would emerge as a world power of
consequence. Kipling wrote this poem specifically to help sway popular
opinion in the US, so that a “friendly” Western power
would hold the strategically important Philippines after the collapse
of the Spanish empire in Southeast Asia.

The view and the term by now are widely regarded as
racist. Nevertheless, it served the purpose of allowing colonization
to proceed in the context of US anti-colonialism self-image and to
legitimize historical racism in the United States.

The colonial powers relied on the excuse of “civilizing”
indigenous peoples to rationalize colonialism. Archeological findings
in South Africa were suppressed for fear that the existence of
sophisticated urban culture in southern Africa prior to European
colonization would pose a threat to the argument that white rule was
necessary to “civilize” the region.

The term “white man's burden” is sometimes used in the
present time to describe double standards toward those of European
descent because of perceived responsibility or culpability for
historical wrongs. It is the main moral argument for affirmative
action in the United States. Increasingly vocal demands are heard from
the black community and the nations of indigenous people in the US for
an official apology and a program of restitution to address such
historical wrongs perpetrated by one people on others.

Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting the culture and
language of one national civilization in another for the purpose of
political and social control. This can take the form of active, formal
policy, such as in education and job opportunities, or a general
attitude of superiority complex.

Empires throughout history have been established using war and
physical compulsion. In the long term, the invading population tended
to become absorbed into the dominant local culture, or acquire its
attributes indirectly. Cultural imperialism reverses this trend by
imposing an alien culture on the conquered. One of the early examples
of cultural imperialism was the extinction of the Etruscan culture and
language caused by the imperial policies of the Romans.

The Greek culture built gymnasiums, theaters and public baths in
places that its adherents conquered, such as ancient Judea, where
Greek cultural imperialism sparked a popular revolt, with the effect
that the subject populations became immersed in the conquering
culture. The spread of the koine (common) Greek language was another
large factor in this immersion.

The prayer-book rebellion of 1549, when the English state sought to
suppress non-English languages with the English-language Book of
Common Prayer, is another example. In replacing Latin with English,
and under the guise of suppressing Catholicism, English was in effect
imposed as the language of the Anglican Church as a dominant societal
institution. Though people in many areas of Cornwall did not speak or
understand English at the time, the Cornish language fell into disuse
as a result. The Cornish people protested against the imposition of an
English prayer book, resulting in large numbers of protesters being
massacred by the king's army, their leaders executed and the
people suffering harsh reprisals.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the dominant English
establishment attempted to eliminate all non-English languages within
the British Isles (such as Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic) by
outlawing them or otherwise marginalizing their speakers. Many other
languages had almost or totally been wiped out, including Cornish and
Manx. “Cultural imperialism” is a term first applied to
the British Empire, with its many measures to impose the conquering
culture on the conquered. These ranged from pound-sterling hegemony,
to the preferred social status given the game of cricket and English
dress codes, to mandatory use and teaching of English, further to
establish Britain's control on nations and territories within the
empire. Language imperialism is the basic element in cultural
imperialism. The discriminatory practice of proper elocution is a
component of in-group cultural imperialism.

As exploration of the Americas increased, European nations including
Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal all
raced to claim territory in hopes of generating increased economic
wealth for themselves. In these new colonies, the European conquerors
imposed their languages and cultures on lands whose indigenous
population was too large or too established to annihilate. The same
took place in Africa and Asia. The record of US policy and abuse of
native Americans is atrocious, going beyond cultural imperialism to
genocide.

During the late 18th, the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the
Swedish government continually repressed the Saami culture. Repression
took numerous forms, such as banning the Saami language and by
forceful removal of many cultural artifacts, such as the magic drums
of the naajds (Saami shamans). Most of the drums have not to date been
returned. Even as late as the 1960s the Sweden-Finnish people of the
Torne Valley had their native Finnish dialect banned from use in
schools and public records.

Cultural imperialism since World War II has primarily been connected
with the US. Most countries outside the United States view the
pervasive US cultural export through business and popular culture as
threatening to their traditional ways of life or moral values. Some
countries, including France and Canada, have adopted official policies
that actively oppose “Americanization”. Representatives of
al-Qaeda stated that their attacks on US interests were motivated in
part by a reaction to perceived US cultural imperialism.

Edward Said of Columbia University, one of the pioneers of
post-colonial studies, has written extensively on the subject of
cultural imperialism. His work highlights the misconceived assumptions
about cultures and societies and is influenced by Michel
Foucault's concepts of discourse and power. Foucault views the
intellectual's role as no longer to place himself somewhat ahead
and to the side in order to express the stifled truth of the
collectivity. Rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power
that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of
knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse. In this sense theory
does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is
practice. But it is local and regional and not totalizing. This is a
struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining
power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to awaken
consciousness that we struggle but to sap power, to take power; it is
an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not
their illumination. Colonialism, the political theory governing
imperialism, is based on a belief that the mores of the colonizer are
superior to those of the colonized on the basis on power. This
colonial mentality explains why former colonies such as Hong Kong
cling to the myth of the superiority of their colonial culture.

According to Said, the Orient signifies a system of representations
framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western
learning, Western consciousness, and Western Empire. The Orient exists
for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the
West. Orientalism refers to the study of Near and Far Eastern
societies and cultures, generally by Westerners. It is a mirror image
of what are inferior and alien (”Other”) to the
West. Although this term had been abandoned as archaic by the late
20th century, Said argues that the term should be redefined to apply
to any current study of such societies to correct current accounts of
the Middle East, India, China, and elsewhere that reflects long-held
Western biases. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism are
laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to
facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and
perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies.

Critical theorists regard Orientalism as part of an effort to justify
colonialism through the concept of the “white man's
burden”, and to wield the sword of modernity against allegedly
“backward” civilizations. A critical theory is an account
of morality that is sensitive to the historically contingent nature of
the culture that spawned it: by adopting a hypothetical stance toward
their own traditions and on this basis grasping their own cultural
relativity, participants in the formation of a critical theory take a
questioning stance toward their own practices while nonetheless
avoiding the paralysis of moral relativism. The current coercive
application of the Western concept of democracy, rule of law,
individual freedom and market fundamentalism as universal truth is a
legitimate target of critical theory.

Promoters of this Western version of modernity see its birth in the
West through a radical transformation of its past. The West of the
Middle Ages, built around a world view of Christian Scholasticism, was
a society of religious philosophy, feudal law, and an agricultural
economy. Out of this past, the Renaissance and Enlightenment produced
a substantially new mentality of science, individualism, industrial
capitalism and imperialism. The cultural foundation of this new
mentality is that reason, not revelation, is the instrument of
knowledge and arbiter of truth; that science, not religion, leads to
truth about nature and life; that the pursuit of happiness in this
life, not the quest for spiritual fulfillment, or suffering in
preparation for the next, is the cardinal purpose of existence; that
reason can and should be used to increase human control through
economic and technological progress; that the individual person is an
end in him/herself with the capacity to direct his/her own life, not a
communal member of society with a prescribed social role; that
individuals should be encouraged to indulge in inalienable rights to
freedom of thought, speech, and action; that religious belief should
be a private affair rather than a collective awareness, that
intolerance is a social disease, and that church and state should be
kept separate.

As the West grows stronger, tolerance of other cultures and of those
within the West itself who refuse to participate is viewed
increasingly as a sign of weakness. Domination takes on sophisticated,
less visible forms. National sovereignty is pushed aside in the name
of replacing command economies with markets, warfare with trade, and
rule by king or commissar with token democracy. To resist
neo-imperialism is to resist modernity. This view justifies the new
empire of the sole superpower, self-proclaimed inheritor of Western
civilization.

Yet this view of modernity misreads history. Thomas Aquinas (1225-71)
benefited intellectually from his exposure to translations of works of
Aristotle from Greek into Latin by Arab scholars to whose world view
he became much indebted. He also profited intellectually from the rise
of universities in Europe during 12th and 13th centuries, notably the
University of Bologna (1088), known for its studies in law, the
University of Padua (founded by dissidents from Bologna), the
University of Paris, and Oxford University, all founded as centers of
learning in theology, not science. In this new intellectual milieu in
Europe, Aquinas applied Aristotelian syllogism as interpreted by Arab
minds to medieval mysticism of revelation. His Summa Theologica
(1267-73) was a systematic exposition of theology on rational
philosophical principles worked out by the ancient Greeks as modified
by Arab precision and algebra, which pioneered the use of variables in
problem-solving in logic.

Up to that time, while Scholasticism, as advanced by St Augustine
(354-430), would vindicate reason in theology, it would carefully
differentiate between theology and philosophy. It would do so by
confining theology, proceeding from faith, to investigations of
revealed truths, while it would limit philosophy, based on reason,
from concern with truths that transcended reason. Revealed truth would
be proclaimed as discoverable only through faith.

The 13th century was a critical point in Christian thought regarding
the relationship between faith and reason. The intellectual community
in Christendom at that time was torn between claims of followers of
Averroes (1126-98), Arabian philosopher from Cordoba in Spain, and
claims of followers of St Augustine, troubled youth turned zealous
convert, founder of Christian theology and spokesman for Christian
mysticism.

Efforts of followers of Averroes in the 13th century to separate
absolutely faith from truth clashed with the traditional claim of
truth being exclusively a matter of faith. Such a claim had been made
for the past nine centuries by followers of St Augustine, whose
contribution to the evolution of Christianity was considered second
only to that of St Paul, apostle to Gentiles and the greatest
missionary apostle. Paul laid down the relentless approach of Western
evangelism by applying to his missionary zeal the same vigor and
intolerance he showed toward the persecution of Christians before his
epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Averroes, Latin name for Abu-al-Walid Ibn Rushd, whose commentaries on
Aristotle would remain influential for four centuries until the
Renaissance, attempted to circumscribe the separate limits of faith
and reason. He asserted that both could process truths and that the
two separate realms need not be reconciled because they are not in
conflict. Siger de Brabant of the University of Paris, leader of the
Averroists, claimed in 1260 that it should be possible, as a matter of
veracity, and tolerable, as a license in intellectual soundness, for a
concept to be true in reason but false in faith or visa versa.

The doctrines of the Averroists, which include denying the immortality
of the individual soul and upholding the eternity of matter, ended up
being officially condemned by the Catholic Church.

St Thomas Aquinas, nicknamed Dumb Ox because of his slow and
deliberate manner of speech, brilliant father of Neo-Scholasticism,
aiming to resolve the dispute between Averroists and Augustinians,
would hold that reason and faith constitute two harmonious realms in
which the truth of faith complements that of reason, both being gifts
of God, but reason having an autonomy of its own. The existence of God
could therefore be discovered through reason, with the grace of God.

The theological significance of this momentous claim by Thomas Aquinas
cannot be over-emphasized. It would save Christianity from falling
into irrelevance in the Age of Reason, sometimes referred to as the
Enlightenment, and preserve tolerance for faith among rational
thinkers in the scientific world. The Thomist claim remained
unchallenged for five centuries until David Hume (1711-86) pointed out
in his Inquiry into Human Understanding that since the conclusion of a
valid inference could contain no information not found in the premise,
there could be no valid conclusion from observed to unobserved
phenomena.

Hume let the logic air out of the Thomist natural-theology balloon,
and in the process showed that even general laws of science could not
be logically justified beyond their own limits, perhaps even including
his own sweeping conclusion. Hume, the empiricist, would logically
determine that logic is circular and goes nowhere: a classic position
of Taoist skepticism.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) emancipated man's command of knowledge
from Humean skepticism. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant
emphasized the contribution of the knower to knowledge. While
acknowledging that the three great issues of metaphysics—God,
freedom and immortality—could not be logically determined, he
asserted that their essence is a necessary presupposition. In his
subsequent publications, Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and
Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant asserted as a moral law his famous
categorical imperative requiring moral actions to be unconditionally
and universally binding to absolute goodwill. Goodwill is singularly
absent in imperialism, classic or neo.

Notwithstanding the enlightened breakthroughs of English Protestant
empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume, and
perhaps in reaction to them, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical
Aeterni Patris in 1879. It declared Scholasticism, as modified by
Thomas Aquinas, to be official Catholic philosophy. Unwittingly,
Scholasticism legitimized the independence of secular politics from
Church control. If reason and faith constitute two harmonious realms
in which the truth of faith complements that of reason, both being
gifts of God, but reason having an autonomy of its own, then politics
and religion can also belong to separate realms in which morality of
religion complements virtue in politics, but politics having an
autonomy of its own. It provided the theological rationalization for
the separation of church and state.

Thus when Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt and prolific author of great influence, wrote: “An all-out
offensive, a jihad, should be waged against modernity so that …
moral rearmament could take place. The ultimate objective is to
re-establish the Kingdom of Allah upon earth,” he was rejecting
not modernity but the modernity of the West. Qutb was not preaching
for suffering in preparation for the next life as Western scholars
such as Bernard Lewis allege, he wanted his civilization back and he
wanted it now.

Qutb did not write out of ignorance of the West. His fundamentalism
was formed during the two years he spent in the United States, which
seemed to him “a disastrous combination of avid materialism and
egoistic individualism”. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), while
admiring the energy and versatility of Americans, also thought they
were too intent on making money and would be condemned to a commercial
culture. In Tocqueville's opinion, Americans' notion of
equality was derived from their “general equality of
condition” rather than from moral commitment and that their
equality might eventually be endangered by the domination of a new
industrial class. Mawlana Abu’l-A’la Mawdudi (1903-79),
the founder of the fundamentalist Jama’at-i Islami in India and
Pakistan, was also militantly opposed to individualism. In an Islamic
state, he wrote, “no one can regard any field of his affairs as
personal and private”.

Modern Asia cannot be fully understood without a thorough awareness of
Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Western influence, from
Christianity to liberalism to Marxism, has only been an ill-fitted
costume over an ancient culture deeply rooted in Confucian values,
Buddhist enlightenment mercy and Taoist paradox. Feudal culture in
China has aspects of what modern political science would label
fascist, socialist, democratic and anarchist. As a socio-political
system, feudalism is inherently authoritarian and
totalitarian. However, since feudal cultural ideals have always been
meticulously nurtured by Confucianism to be congruent with the
political regime, social control, while pervasive, is seldom
consciously felt as oppression by the general public. Or, more
accurately, social oppression—both vertical, such as sovereign
to subject, and horizontal, such as gender prejudice—is
considered natural for lack of an accepted alternative
vision. Concepts such as equality, individuality, privacy, personal
freedom and democracy are deemed antisocial, and only longed for by
the deranged-of-mind, such as radical Taoists. This was true in large
measure up to modern times when radical Taoists were transformed into
radical political and cultural dissidents.

Buddhism (Fo Jiao) first appeared in China officially in AD 65. Some
evidence suggests that it might have been imported to China from India
as early as 2 BC. Since its introduction, Buddhism has permeated
Chinese society and its economic life, despite periodic suppression by
the state. It had affected the customs of all levels of society by the
time of the Tang Dynasty some six centuries after its
introduction. Buddhist temples, monasteries and shrines had been
established in every part of the empire. The services of sengs
(Buddhist monks) became indispensable for all social events,
performing religious ceremonies for funerals and weddings, blessings
for newborns, administering temples for the faithful and attending
family shrines for the elite. Sengs functioned as preachers, teachers,
scribes, artists and even doctors. Often they would become top
advisors to the huangdi (emperor), and many sengs would even become
powerful political figures both at court and at the local level.

The name Buddha (Fo) is a Sanskrit word meaning Enlightened One. It is
the appellation conferred by the faithful on Indian Prince Siddhartha
Gautama (563-483 BC), who came from the southern foothills of the
Himalayas.

Buddhism originated at the end of 5th century BC in the valley of the
middle Ganges in India. The religious sect first rose as a plebeian
reaction to claims of spiritual and social supremacy by Hindu Brahman
priests who were the ruling elite of the Indian caste system. Since
that time, Buddhism has spread across political, social and ethnic
boundaries as one of the three great religions of the world, the other
two being Christianity and Islam.

Curiously, acceptance of Buddhism remained sporadic in India, its
birthplace. The incorporation of Buddha by Hinduism as the ninth
incarnation (avatar) of its god, Vishnu, seriously adulterated the
autonomous uniqueness of Buddhism in India. The Muslim invasion of
India from the 11th century gradually but effectively obliterated
remaining Buddhist communities there. Similarly, Christianity remains
a minority religion in the Middle East, its holy place of origin.

Kanishka, an ardent patron of Buddhism, was king of the Kushan Empire,
which dominated northern India during the 2nd century AD. He was also
known in history as the sponsor of a Greco-Buddhist style of
sculpture, labeled by art historians as the Gandhara school, typified
by curly-haired seated Buddha statues, which became the dominant
Buddhist art form in East Asia. A gilded bronze Buddha of the Gandhara
school is on display at the Harvard Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. More significant, Kanishka was instrumental in
introducing Buddhism into Central Asia, whence it spread first to
China, then Korea and finally Japan.

The branch of Buddhism that diffused into East Asia would take on
different characteristics from the early sects of Buddha's own
time. It would come to be known as Mahayana (Dasheng, meaning major
vehicle), the scripture of which is written in classical Sanskrit,
distinguishing itself from the older Hinayana (Xiaosheng, meaning
minor vehicle), the scripture of which is written in a vernacular
dialect (Prakrit) known as Pali. Hinayana Buddhism, remaining closer
to ancient Buddhism, is practiced widely in Southeast Asia today.

The Sermon of the Turning of the Wheel of the Law, delivered by Buddha
at Sarnath around 500 BC, elucidates the secret of a happy life by
means of the Four Exalted Truths:

Buddhist concerns are more ethical than metaphysical, focusing on
human suffering, which is considered as inherent in life
itself. Suffering can be dispelled only by abandoning desires such as
ambition, selfishness, envy and greed. This approach to life is the
diametrical opposite of the Western concept of modernity.

Detachment is key. Buddhists take vows against killing, stealing,
falsehood, unchasteness and intoxication. They practice
self-confession and try to live austere, ascetic lives with the
objective of achieving nirvana, a state of blissful detachment that,
when attained permanently, known as pari-nirvana, brings an end to the
otherwise never-ending cycle of earth-bound rebirths through
transmigration of the soul. The Four Exalted Truths of Buddhism have
helped devotees deal with the tribulations of life. The Third Exalted
Truth, sorrow subsides when desire wanes, has application to modern
market economy. A basic Buddhist tenet: the secret of happiness is not
getting what you want, but wanting what you get. So much for the
concept of the pursuit of happiness in Western modernity. For the
Buddhist idea of happiness, if you have to pursue it, you have lost
it.

The reasons for China's popular embrace of Buddhism are complex
and have been subject to constant reassessment. One commonly
acknowledged reason is that Buddhism, while of foreign origin, shares
commonality with both Taoist and Confucian concepts that are
indigenous to Chinese culture. The passive side of Buddhism is Taoism,
which practices contemplation and promotes self-awareness. And the
active side of Buddhism is Confucianism, which advocates respect for
authority and submission to propriety. Furthermore, Buddhism has
provided, as it has evolved in China, elaborate, colorful ceremonies
welcomed by one aspect of the collective Chinese character, hitherto
suppressed through centuries of Confucian social restraint and Taoist
self-denial.

Most of all, Buddhism fills a void left by traditional ancient Chinese
religious concepts, which are centered rigidly around the trinity: 1)
Heaven (Tian)—God. 2) Son of Heaven (Tianzi)—Emperor
(sovereign). 3) The Hundred Surnames (Baixing)—People.

Heaven (Tian) is the abstract symbol of all things supernatural and
authoritative, much like the manner in which the imperial court is
referred to as the authoritative and decision-making body of the
secular empire. God, a term that has no exact equivalent in the
language of polytheistic Chinese culture, has its closest translation
as Tiandi (King in Heaven), who is the highest god. Heaven as a realm
is believed to be inhabited by a clan of gods and spirits (shen-gui),
with hierarchical ranks, headed by Tiandi, similar to the Greek
hierarchical community of gods headed by Zeus.

The secular huangdi (emperor) is the Son of Heaven (Tianzi), and the
people, known as the Hundred Surnames (Baixing), are wards of
huangdi. The people do not enjoy the privilege of directly
communicating with Heaven, the domain of gods headed by Tiandi. The
people's duty is to pay homage to the Son of Heaven, who alone
possesses the privilege of communicating with and thanksgiving to
Heaven. The most solemn ritual in Chinese feudal culture is the
fengshan rites. It is a ritual that confers Heaven's abdication of
authority on secular affairs in favor of huangdi.

Thus religion in China, before the arrival of Buddhism, had merely
been a spiritual subsystem of the secular world. It was a spiritual
extension of the rigid hierarchy of the ancient Chinese
socio-political realm. Buddhism provided a previously unavailable
outlet of direct religious expression for the common people. It
introduced participatory religious experience into Chinese
society. Whereas, in the context of the rigid Confucian social
structure, Taoism (Dao Jia) provides the Chinese people with
introverted individual spiritual freedom, Buddhism provides them with
extroverted collective spiritual liberation, independent of communal
hierarchy. Taoism allows the individual to contemplate privately,
freeing him from the mental tyranny of an all-controlling culture,
while Buddhism allows the people to worship independently, freeing
them from the pervasive control of a rigid secular socio-political
hierarchy.

Religion in China has a different meaning than in the West. The term
“religion” in the Chinese language is composed of two
characters: zong-jiao, literally meaning “ancestral
teaching”. Until the spread of Buddhism, religious experience
for the Chinese people had been limited to reverence toward the
spirits of their departed ancestors. Buddhism provided the average
devotee with direct access to God without requiring a denial of
reverence for ancestral spirits. Until the introduction of
Christianity, the Chinese were not required by religion to deny the
spirituality of their ancestors. This demand for the rejection of
ancestor worship was a key obstacle preventing Christianity from
becoming a major religion in China. Incidentally, even in Christian
theology, “God” is translated in Chinese as Shangdi,
meaning “The King Above”. It is a celestial echo of the
supreme ruler in the secular political system.

From its beginning, Buddhism took on an anti-establishment posture,
which it moderated as it developed in China but never totally
abandoned. Traditionally, in the early part of an emperor's reign,
as soon as his rule was firmly established, he would perform the
elaborate and formal fengshan rites. These Confucian rites of
theocratic feudalism involve the paying of tribute by Tianzi (Son of
Heaven) as huangdi (emperor), on behalf of his baixing, namely the
people, to Tian (Heaven) where the head god Tiandi (King in Heaven)
reigns. Through the fengshan rites, the huangdi received tribute and
accepted loyalty pledges from his vassal lords on behalf of their many
minions and subjects throughout the empire. Anyone besides the huangdi
performing religious rites directly to Heaven would be committing
forbidden acts tantamount to treasonous usurpation. Buddhism broke the
monopolistic hold of the huangdi on religious celebration and opened
it to all for the taking. Little wonder Buddhism spread like
wildflowers.

By breaking down the hierarchical religious monopoly implied by
Confucian fengshan rites, Buddhism in its early history in China
unwittingly contributed to the crumbling of the foundation of a feudal
hierarchy already in decline. Buddhism's populist theology
bolstered the emergence of a secular structure in the form of a
centrally managed empire, replacing autonomous local authority. In
this new secular structure individuals could participate more freely
in social functions, unrestricted by traditional local hierarchy.

The Buddhist notion of nirvana runs parallel to the concept of the
Mandate of Heaven (Tianming). Ironically, by claiming that a state of
nirvana could be earned through religious devotion by any deserving
member of society, it implies that the Mandate of Heaven can also be
earned by any deserving hero. Thus Buddhism invited periodic and
recurring suppression from paranoid emperors who felt obliged to adopt
anti-subversive measures against Buddhism, in order to defend the
imperial claim on the Mandate of Heaven from challenges by ambitious
members of the aristocracy who were Buddhist devotees.

While Buddhism serves as the fountainhead of the idea of open access
for all to spiritual salvation, such universal access is dependent on
the grace of detachment as exemplified by Buddha. This idea is akin to
the detached central authority in an empire structure with the grace
of a distant emperor who is less involved with the details of daily
living of his subjects. It is less akin to the archaic hierarchical
feudalism of autonomous local lords who control every detail of the
lives of his fief. Thus Buddhism facilitated its own growth at the
same time that it provided the philosophical justification for the
flowering of a distant centralized political order in a complex,
multi-dimensional society. The development of such a benign
centralized political structure, first budding in imperial China in
the 5th century, gathered unstoppable momentum around the 7th century.

The Buddhist concept of universal open access to nirvana had
socio-political implications. It helped shift politics from being a
contest among competing feudal lords refereed by an arbitrating
huangdi to the beginning of an empirewide power struggle based on
class interests. Since people were no longer dependent on their feudal
lords for achieving the state of nirvana, they no longer felt
inseparably bound to their lords in secular life. Gradually, merchants
in the service of a particular feudal lord found stronger common
interest with other merchants in the service of competing lords than
their traditional commitment to clannish feudal loyalty. Before long,
the same became true for farmers, scholars, artisans and other
tradesmen. And with the tacit encouragement of expanding central
power, people began to look to the huangdi as a higher authority to
champion universal justice and to protect their separate class
interests. They also looked to Buddhism to enhance the moral posture
of class solidarity against the Confucian demand for absolute
hierarchical loyalty toward their local lords. Thus the spread of
Buddhism ushered in an age of strong central imperial authority on top
of traditional feudalism with local autonomy. Through the spread of
Buddhism, an empirewide standard now overshadowed fragmented local
autonomy on basic issues of proper human relationship, justice and
social order.

Simultaneously, however, Buddhist insistence on a clear separation of
ecclesiastical authority from secular control caused constant conflict
between the central authority of the dragon throne and
independent-minded Buddhist fundamentalists. This conflict was
exploited by freewheeling members of guizu (the aristocracy) for
secular political purposes, particularly those in the south, where
greater physical distance from the capital translated into greater
local autonomy.

The intellectual role of Buddhist institutions grew increasingly
significant and pervasive in Chinese culture. Sengs (Buddhist monks)
of various sects, in addition to their religious undertakings, took to
routinely writing philosophy, conducting schools and keeping
libraries. The independence of Buddhist teaching from forbidding
Confucian scholasticism was an important factor in Buddhism's
popular flowering in China. Buddhist curricula were admittedly
overburdened with time-consuming, mind-boggling theological studies,
but the discipline acquired from such study methods more than
compensated for the heavy investment in time and effort. Excellence in
exegesis requires scholarship, research methodology, creative logic
and secular evidential verification, qualities that learned sengs
cultivated. Buddhist seng-scholars soon dominated the fields of
mathematics, alchemy, medicine, astronomy and engineering. Buddhist
impact on Chinese philosophy was fundamental, introducing new
concepts, abstract terms and new words for the description and
manipulation of previously unfathomable ideas. Buddhism's
influence in Chinese art, architecture and literature was undeniably
crucial. Such influence in Tang helped liberate Chinese culture from
Confucianism's stultifying repression, particularly on new and
creative ideas, much as Western scientific methods would 12 centuries
later.

In literature, Buddhist sutras (fojing), which were more widely
circulated and popularly read than abstruse and elitist Confucian
classics, paved the way for other new and lengthy secular literary
works, and prepared the reading public for acceptance of mixing prose
with verse, for handling of multi-dimensional themes and, ultimately,
for the birth of new literary genres such as the novel and drama.

Buddhist understanding of history and of the art of statecraft
challenged the staid monopoly of orthodox Confucianism on
politics. And Buddhists were increasingly recognized for relative
objectivity in their judgment of history and for innovative
originality in their approach to secular problems. In both military
strategy and political theory, Buddhist intellectual contributions
played major roles in a fragmented China's quest for
reunification. In return, Buddhism flourished under those rulers, such
as those of the Sui Dynasty (581-618), who were wise enough to employ
universally potent Buddhist ideas and apply them to political
advantage, let alone exploiting ready-made, broad-based support of
mushrooming Buddhist communities all over the fragmented political
landscape.

The development of China's culture, politics and spirit cannot be
fully understood without taking into account the influence of Buddhism
since its importation around 2 BC. From the 5th century AD on,
Buddhists both contributed to, and in turn were affected by, the
historic polarization in China during the era of North-South Dynasties
(Nan-Bei Chao 420-589), a period spanning the late phase of Six
Dynasties (Liu Chao 220-589) that emerged after the fall of the
glorious Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) four centuries
previously. Buddhism adapted itself during this period in the south to
a society characterized by the independence of a transplanted guizu
(aristocracy), with large estates of client groups. Its ecclesiastical
structure developed into a network of loosely connected, but
individually autonomous, monasteries.

It was therefore not surprising that the great southern seng (Buddhist
monk) Huiyun (334-416) wrote an anti-Confucian essay titled
“Treatise on the Exemption of Religious Institutions from
Monarchial Authority” (Shamen bujing Wangzhi Lun). Written in
404, the treatise asserted the independence of religion from secular
control. It was among the earliest intellectual treatises on the
principle of separation of church and state.

During the era of North-South Dynasties, traditional central political
authority in the north forced Buddhism to seek support from the ruling
sovereign, who tended to be the sole source of secular favors. For
example, with transparent motive and shrewd purpose, Seng Fakuo (died
420) of the Bei Wei Dynasty (Northern Wei 386-534), leader of the
Buddhist clergy in the north, claimed Emperor Daowu (reigned 386-409)
as the living reincarnation of Buddha. Seng Fakuo was bestowed high
secular titles during his life, culminating with a hereditary rank of
lord.

Buddhists of 7th-century China sought favoritism from the secular
state at the same time they asserted their independence and separation
from traditional imperial institutions by calling for Buddhist
exemption from taxation, military service and the long arm of secular
law. This inherently contradictory posture still would not have
brought the wrath of the dragon throne on Buddhists if they had not
been simultaneously engaged in secular factional intrigues and class
politics.

Furthermore, growing abuse of religious privileges and laxity in
monastic discipline inevitably forced the dragon throne to adopt
intrusive measures of control on theology, and secular supervision of
ecclesiastic establishments. Also, proliferation of clerical
ordination and monasterial founding, much of which was less than
legitimate if not outright fraudulent, began to deprive the state of
much-needed manpower and tax revenue. The removal from the economy of
large tracts of prime land that would be donated outright, or under
formulas of deferred giving, or sometimes through fraudulent,
tax-evading schemes, caused serious economic imbalance in many
areas. The sanctuary provided by Buddhist monasteries to the lawless,
to tax evaders and conscript dodgers, as well as to political
dissidents, also threatened the totalitarian authority of the dragon
throne and security interests of the secular order.

The huge expense of Buddhist temple construction, the costly
maintenance of an ever-expanding clergy population and its associated
lay communities and the drain on the scarce supply of metal caused by
the casting of ever larger and larger Buddhist statues and bells
interfered with the secular state's own increasingly ambitious
plans for domestic capital construction and for arms production needed
by foreign conquest.

The growing economic power of Buddhist monasteries, often the main
socio-economic institutions in many regions, also had destabilizing
political implications. While Buddhism was repeatedly sponsored by
secular authorities for political purposes, official anti-Buddhist
pogroms, known as shatai (ecclesiastical cleansing), systematically
recurred throughout the long history of China. This continued up to
the Christian-supported 1911 Democratic Revolution that established
the Nationalist Republic, not to mention the subsequent
Marxist-Leninist People's Republic, particularly during the
Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

The distressing phenomenon of shatai became even more complex when
other issues, such as xenophobia, backlash from social reform, and
preventive suppression of political revolts mingled with traditional
socio-political pressure for curbing Buddhist expansion into the
secular world. State persecution and state sponsorship of religion
proved always to be two sides of the same evil coin.

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1984), Swedish sociologist-economist, in his 1944
definitive study The American Dilemma, for which he received the 1974
Nobel Prize for Economics, having declared the “Negro”
problem in the United States to be inextricably entwined with the
democratic functioning of American society, went on to produce a 1976
study of Southeast Asia: The Asian Dilemma. In it he identified
Buddhist acceptance of suffering as the prime cause for economic
underdevelopment in the region. Myrdal's conclusion would appear
valid superficially, given the coincidence of an indisputable
existence of conditions of poverty in the region at the time of his
study and the pervasive influence of Buddhism in Southeast Asian
culture, until the question is asked as to why, whereas Buddhism has
dominated Southeast Asia for more than a millennium, pervasive poverty
in the region only made its appearance after the arrival of Western
imperialism in the 19th century.

Marxists and nationalists, many of both professing no love for
Buddhism, suggested that Myrdal had been influenced in his convenient
conclusion by his eagerness to deflect responsibility for the sorry
state of affairs in the region from the legacy of Western
imperialism. As theological apologists tried to rationalize social
misery with an accommodating theology to capture the appreciation of
the secular polity, Myrdal, social scientist, tried to blame
indigenous religion for the sins of secular geopolitics.

That which Western scholars identify as the process of modernity
appears to have occurred in China's history more than once.

Part 3: Rule of law vs Confucianism

The rule of law has been touted frequently by Western scholars as a
central aspect of modernity. According to that measure of
periodization, since the rule of law was the basis of the first
unification of China in the 2nd century BC, modernity occurred 23
centuries ago in China.

Researchers have pointed out that at the end of the 17th century,
while the Chinese empire often appeared in English literature as a
metaphor for “tyranny”, such as in the works of Daniel
Defoe, best known for his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, it was also at
times praised for its legal code long established on ideals of order,
morality, and good government, such as in the work of Lady Mary
Chudleigh, to the more uniform perception of China's legal system
at the turn of the century, when George Henry Mason published The
Punishments of China (1801). Michel Foucault's analytical approach
to history highlights the limitations of European efforts to
comprehend China's moral, juridical and legal structures.

The promulgation of a new edition of law, known as the Tang Code of
Perpetual Splendor (Tang Yonghui Lu), in the 10th lunar month in the
fourth year of the reign of Perpetual Splendor (Yonghui) of the Tang
Dynasty, in AD 653, was in reality just an update effort, based on the
original Tang Code (Tang Lu), which in turn was based on the Sui Code
(Sui Lu), which had initially been compiled 73 years earlier by the
late founding Civil Emperor (Wendi) of the preceding Sui Dynasty and
updated ever since by every succeeding sovereign. But the Tang Code of
Perpetual Splendor is singled out by history, mostly because of its
definitive comprehensiveness.

The original Tang Code was promulgated 29 years earlier, in 624, by
the founding High Grand Emperor (Gaozu) of the Tang Dynasty. It would
become in modern times the earliest fully preserved legal code in the
history of Chinese law. It was endowed with a commentary, known as
Tanglu Shuyi, incorporated in 653, the fourth year of the reign of
Perpetual Splendor, as part of the Tang Code of Perpetual Splendor.

The Tang Code was based on the Code of Northern Zhou (Bei Zhou Lu,
557-581), promulgated 89 years earlier in 564, which was in turn based
on the earlier, less comprehensive and less elaborate Code of Cao Wei
(Cao Wei Lu, 220-265) and the Code of Western Jin (Xi Jin Lu, 265-317)
promulgated almost four centuries earlier in 268.

Western perception on the alleged underdevelopment of law in Chinese
civilization is based on both factual ignorance and cultural
bias. Chinese dismissal of the rule of law is not a rejection of
modernity, but a rejection of primitiveness. Confucian attitude places
low reliance on law and punishment for maintaining social
order. Evidence of this can be found in the Aspiration (Zhi) section
of the 200-volume Old Book on Tang (Jiu Tang Shu), a magnum opus of
Tang historiography. The history classic was compiled under official
supervision in 945 during the Late Jin Dynasty (Hou Jin, 936-946) of
the era of Five Generations (Wudai, 907-960), some three centuries
after the actual events. A single chapter on Punishment and Law
(Xingfa) places last after seven chapters on Rites (Liyi), after which
come four chapters on Music (Yinyue), three chapters on Calendar (Li),
two on Astronomy and Astrology (Tianwen), one on Physics (Wuheng),
four on Geography (Dili), three on Hierarchy of Office (Zhiguan), one
on Carriages and Costume (Yufu), two on Sutras and Books (Jingji), two
on Commodities (Chihuo) and finally comes a single chapter Punishment
and Law, in that order.

The Confucian Code of Rites (Liji) is expected to be the controlling
document on civilized behavior, not law. In the Confucian world view,
rule of law is applied only to those who have fallen beyond the bounds
of civilized behavior. Civilized people are expected to observe proper
rites. Only social outcasts are expected to have their actions
controlled by law. Thus the rule of law is considered a state of
barbaric primitiveness, prior to achieving the civilized state of
voluntary observation of proper rites. What is legal is not
necessarily moral or just.

Under the supervision of Tang Confucian minister Fang Xuanling, 500
sections of ancient laws were compiled into 12 volumes in the Tang
Code, titled:

Criminals above age 90 and those under age seven received only
suspended sentences. For others, sentences could be redeemed by cash
payments. A death sentence was worth 120 catties of copper coins (1
catty = 1.33 pounds). Officials were entitled to discounts on
sentences on private civil offenses: those of Fifth Ranks and above
were entitled to a reduction of two years; those of ninth rank and
above were entitled to one year; but for public crimes, an additional
year was added to the sentence for all officials.

The Chinese term for “law” is fa-lu. The word fa means
“method”. The word lu means “standard”. In
other words, law is a methodical standard for behavior in society. A
musical instrument with resonant tubes that form the basis of musical
scales, the Chinese equivalent of the tuning fork, is also called
lu. In law, the word lu implies a standard scale for measuring social
behavior of civilized men.

The first comprehensive code of law in China had been compiled by the
Origin Qin Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi, reigned 246-210 BC), unifier of
China. Known as the Qin Code (Qin Lu), it was a political instrument
as well as a legal one. It was the legislative manifestation of a
Legalist political vision. It aimed at instituting uniform rules for
prescribing appropriate social behavior in a newly unified social
order. It sought to substitute fragmented traditional local practices,
left from the ancient regime of privileged aristocratic lineages. It
tried to dismantle Confucian exemptions accorded to special
relationships based on social hierarchies and clan connections.

The pervasive growth of new institutions in the unifying Qin Dynasty
(221-207 BC) was the result of objective needs of a rising
civilization. Among these new institutions was a unified legal system
of impartial rewards and punishments according to well-promulgated and
clearly defined codes of prescribed behavior. The law was enforced
through the practice of lianzuo (linked seats), a form of social
control by imposing criminal liability on the perpetrator's clan
members, associates and friends. Qin culture heralded the later
emergence of a professional shidafu (literati-bureaucrat) based on
meritocracy. It also introduced a uniform system of weights, measures
and monetary instruments and it established standard trade practices
for the smooth operation of a unified economic system for the whole
empire. The effect of Qin Legalist governance on Chinese political
culture pushed Chinese civilization a great step forward toward
forging an unified nation and culture, but in the process lost much of
the richness of its ancient, local traditions and rendered many
details of its fragmented past incomprehensible to posterity.

In the first half of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), the Han imperial
government adopted the Legalist policies of the Qin Dynasty it had
replaced. It systemically expanded its power over tribal guizu by
wholesale adaptation of Legalist political structure from the brief
(15 years) but consequential reign of the preceding Qin
Dynasty. Gradually, with persistent advice from Confucian ministers,
in obsessive quest for dependable political loyalty to the Han
dynastic house, Legalist policies of equal justice for all were
abandoned in favor of Confucian tendencies of formalized exemptions
from law, cemented with special relationships (guanxi) based on social
positions and kinship. The Tang Code, promulgated in AD 624,
institutionalized this Confucian trend by codifying it. It would lay
the foundation for a hierarchal social structure that would generate a
political culture that would resist the proposition that all men are
created equal to mean similarity. In Confucian culture, civilized man
is created as closely connected individuals to form building blocks of
society. It is the universality of man that celebrates individualism,
not the Western notion of alienation as individualism.

Elaborately varied degrees of punishment are accorded by the Tang Code
to the same crime committed by persons of different social stations,
just as Confucian rites ascribe varying lengths of mourning periods to
the survivors of the deceased of various social ranks. According to
Confucian logic, if the treatment for death, the most universal of
fates, is not socially equal, why should it be for the treatment for
crime? William Blake (1757-1827), born 23 centuries after Confucius
(551-479 BC), would epitomize the problem of legal fairness in search
for true justice, by his famous pronouncement: “One law for the
lion and the ox is oppression.” Confucians are not against the
concept of equal justice for all; they merely have a sophisticated
notion of the true meaning of justice.

In Chinese history, the entrenched political feudal order relies on
the philosophical concepts of Confucianism (Ru Jia). The rising
agricultural capitalistic order draws on the ideology of Legalism (Fa
Jia). These two philosophical postures, Confucianism and Legalism, in
turn construct alternative and opposing moral contexts, each providing
rationalization for the ultimate triumph of its respective sponsoring
social order.

The struggle between these two competing social orders has been going
on, with alternating periods of triumph for each side, since the
Legalist Qin Dynasty first united China in 221 BC, after 26 years of
unification war. The effect of this struggle was still visible in the
politics of contemporary China, particularly during the Great
Proletariat Cultural Revolution of 1966-78, when the Gang of Four
promoted Legalist concepts to attack the existing order, accusing it
of being Confucian in philosophy and counterrevolutionary in
ideology. To the extent that “left” and
“right” convey meaningful images in modern political
nomenclature, Taoism (Dao Jia) would be to the left of Confucianism as
Legalism would be to the right.

Modern Legalists in China, such as the so-called Gang of Four, were
the New Left, whose totalitarian zeal to promote social justice
converged, in style if not in essence, with the New Right, or
neo-conservatives of the West, in its reliance on authoritarian zeal
to defend individualism. Thus the notion that modernity is a Western
phenomenon is highly problematic.

The flowering of Chinese philosophy in the 5th century BC was not
accidental. By that time, after the political disintegration of the
ancient Xi Zhou Dynasty (Western Zhou, 1027-771 BC), Chinese society
was at a crossroads in its historical development. Thus an eager
market emerged for various rival philosophical underpinnings to
rationalize a wide range of different, competing social systems. The
likes of Confucius were crisscrossing the fragmented political
landscape of petty independent kingdoms, seeking fame and fortune by
hawking their moral precepts and political programs to ambitious and
opportunistic monarchs.

Traditionally, members of the Chinese guizu (the aristocracy) were
descendants of hero warriors who provided meritorious service to the
founder of a dynasty. Relatives of huangdi (the emperor), provided
they remained in political good graces, also became aristocrats by
birthright, although technically they were members of huangzu (the
imperial clan). The emperor lived in constant fear of this guizu
class, more than he feared the peasants, for guizu members had the
means and political ambition for successful coups. Peasant uprisings
in Chinese history have been rare, only seven uprisings in 4,000 years
of recorded history up to the modern time. Moreover, these uprisings
have tended to aim at local abuse of power rather than at central
authority. Aristocratic coups, on the other hand, have been countless
and frequent.

In four millennia, Chinese history recorded 559
emperors. Approximately one-third of them suffered violent deaths from
aristocratic plots, while none had been executed by rebelling
peasants.

The political function of the emperor was to keep peace and order
among contentious nobles and to protect peasants from aristocratic
abuse. This was the basic rationale of government as sovereign. A
sovereign, whether an emperor or a president, without the loyal
support of peasants, euphemistically referred to as the Mandate of
Heaven (Tianming), would soon find himself victim of a palace coup or
aristocratic revolt. This is the socialist root of all
governments. The neo-liberal claim of the proper role of government as
ensuring a free market is a capitalist cooptation of government.

The Code of Rites (Liji), the ritual compendium as defined by
Confucius, circumscribed acceptable personal behavior for all in a
hierarchical society. It established rules of appropriate
socio-political conduct required in a feudal
civilization. Unfortunately, ingrained conditioning by conservative
Confucian teaching inevitably caused members of the aristocratic class
to degenerate in time from truly superior stock into mediocre and
decadent seekers of unearned privileges. Such degeneration was brought
about by the nature of their privileged life and the false security
derived from a Confucian superiority complex. Although the process
might sometimes take centuries to take shape, some dynasties would
crumble within decades through the unchecked excesses of their ruling
classes.

Confucianism, by promoting unquestioning loyalty toward authority,
encouraged the powerful to abuse their power, despite
Confucianism's reliance on ritual morality as a mandate for
power. Confucianism is therefore inescapably the victim of its own
success, as Taoists are fond of pointing out.

Generally, those who feel they can achieve their political objectives
without violence would support the Code of Rites. While those whose
political objectives are beyond the reach of non-violent, moral
persuasion would dismiss it as a tool of oppression. Often, those who
attacked the Code of Rites during their rise to power would find it
expedient to promote, after achieving power, the very code they
belittled before, since they soon realized that the Code of Rites was
the most effective governing tool for a sitting ruler.

To counter hostile tendencies toward feudal values and to ensure
allegiance to the feudal system, keju (civil examinations), while
providing equal opportunity to all talented, were designed to test
candidates on their knowledge of a syllabus of Confucian doctrines
contained in the Five Classics (Wujing). Confucian ethics were
designed to buttress the terms of traditional social contract. They
aimed to reduce potential for violent conflict between the arrived and
the arriving. They aimed to channel the powerful energy of the
arriving into a constructive force for social renewal. Confucian
ethics aimed to forge in perpetuity a continuing non-violent dialectic
eclecticism, to borrow a Hegelian term for the benefit of Western
comprehension.

The violent overthrow of the government, a criminal offense in the
United States, is a moral sin in Confucian ethics. It is therefore
natural that budding revolutionaries should attack Confucian ethics as
reactionary, and that those already in power should tirelessly promote
Confucian ethics as the only proper code of behavior for a
self-renewing, civilized socio-political order. In Chinese politics,
Confucianism is based on a theory of rule by self-restraint. It
advocates the sacredness of hierarchy and the virtue of loyalty. It is
opposed by Legalism, which subscribes to a theory of rule by universal
law and impartial enforcement. Again, the Western claim that the rule
of law is a unique foundation of modernity peculiar to the West is
historically unsubstantiated.

Although Buddhists have their own disagreements with Legalist
concepts, particularly on the issue of mercy, which they value as a
virtue while Legalists detest it as the root of corruption, such
disagreements are muted by Buddhist appreciation of Legalist
opposition to both Confucianism and Taoism, ideological nemeses of
Buddhism (Fo Jiao). Above all, Buddhists need for their own protection
Legalism's opposition to selective religious
persecution. Legalism, enemy of Buddhism's enemies, is selected by
Buddhists as a convenient ally.

Legalism places importance on three aspects. The first is shi
(authority), which is based on the legitimacy of the ruler and the
doctrinal orthodoxy of his policies. The second is shu (skill) in
manipulative exercise of power, and the third is fa (law), which, once
publicly proclaimed, should govern universally without
exceptions. These three aspects Legalists consider as three pillars of
a well-governed society. If the rule of law is a characteristic of
modernity, then modernity arrived in China in 3rd century BC.

According to Confucian political theory, the essential political
function of all subjects is to serve the emperor, not personally, but
as sovereign, who is the sole legitimate personification of the
political order and sovereign of the political realm. Legalists argue
that while all powers emanate by right from the Son of Heaven, the
proper execution of these powers can take place only within an
impartial system of law. While people should be taught their ritual
responsibilities, they should at the same time be held responsible by
law not only for each person's individual acts but also for one
another's conducts, as an extensive form of social control within
a good community. Therefore, punishment should be meted out to not
only the culprit, but also to his relatives, friends, associates and
neighbors, for negligence of their ritual duties in constraining the
culprit. This is natural for a society in which the individual is
inseparable from community.

Efficiency of government and equal justice for all are cardinal rules
of good politics. Legalists believe that administration of the state
should be entrusted to officials appointed according to merit, rather
than to hereditary nobles or literati with irrelevant
scholarship. Even granting validity to the extravagant Taoist claim
that ideas, however radical, are inherently civilized and noble,
Legalists insist that when ideas are transformed into unbridled
action, terror, evil, vulgarity and destruction emerge. Freedom of
thought must be balanced by rule of law to restrain the corruption of
ideas by action.

Whereas being well versed in Confucianism bound the shidafu class
culturally as faithful captives to the imperial system, such rigid
mentality ironically also rendered its subscribers indifferent to
objective problem-solving. Thus Confucianism, by its very nature,
would ensure eventual breakdown of the established order, at which
point Legalism would gain ascendancy for a period, to put in place new
policies and laws that would be more responsive to objective
conditions. But Confucians took comfort in the fact that, in time, the
new establishment that Legalists put in charge would discover the
utilitarian advantage of Confucianism to the ruling elite. And the
cycle of conservative consolidation would start once again. Generally,
periods of stability and steady decay would last longer than intervals
of violent renewal through Legalist reform, so that Confucianism would
become more ingrained after each cycle. Western capitalism is in
essence a feudal system, supported by a legal system that legitimizes
property rights and class distinction based on private capital
ownership. In contemporary Chinese political nomenclature, the
proletariat is defined not merely as workers, but the property-less
class.

This perpetual, cyclical development proves to the Taoist mind that
indeed “life goes in circles”. It is an astute observation
made by the ancient sage Laozi, father of Taoism, who lived during the
6th century BC and who was the alleged ancestor of the Tang imperial
clan of 7th century AD.

The so-called Gang of Four promoted Legalist politics in China in the
1970s. They used Marxist orthodox doctrine, reinforced by the Maoist
personality cult, as shi (influence), Communist party discipline as
shu (skill) for exercising power, and dictatorial rule as fa (laws) to
be obeyed with no exceptions allowed for tradition, ancient customs or
special relationships and with little regard for human
conditions. Legalists yearn for a perfectly administered state, even
if the price is the unhappiness of its citizens. They seek an
inviolable system of impartial justice, without extenuating
allowances, even at the expense of the innocent. When a priori truth
appears threatened by fidelity in logic, Confucians predictably always
rely on faithful loyalty to tradition as a final argument.

Confucius, the quintessential conservative, the most influential
philosopher in Chinese culture, admired the idealized society of the
ancient Xi Zhou Dynasty, when men purportedly lived in harmony under
sage rulers.

The fact that the Zhou Dynasty had been a feudal society based on
slavery did not concern Confucius. To the idealist Confucius,
hierarchical stations in human society were natural and symbiotic. If
everyone would contentedly do his duty according to his particular
station in society, and with an accepting state of mind known as
anfen, then all men would benefit as social life meliorates toward an
ideal state of high civilization.

To Confucius, the lot of a slave in a good society was preferable to
that of a lord in a society marked by chaos and uncivilized
immorality. Violent social changes would only create chaos, which
would bring decay and destruction to all, lords and slaves alike. Such
violent changes would kill the patient in the process of fighting the
disease. Confucius apparently never sought the opinion of any slave on
this matter.

Like Plato, Confucius conceived a world in which the timeless ideal of
morality constitutes the perfect reality, of which the material world
is but a flawed reflection.

The Zhou people, according to Confucius—in stark contrast to
historical fact—aspired to be truthful, wise, good and
righteous. They allegedly observed meticulously their social ritual
obligation (li) and with clear understanding of the moral content of
such rites. Confucius never explained why the Zhou people failed so
miserably in their noble aspirations, or the cause of their eventual
fall from civilized grace.

In the Confucian world view, men have degenerated since the fall of
the Zhou Dynasty. As a result of barbarian invasions of Chinese
society and of natural atrophy, social order has broken down. But,
being fundamentally good, men can be salvaged through education, the
key to which is moral examples, emanating from the top, because the
wisest in an ideal society would naturally rise to the top. And they
have a responsibility to teach the rest of society by the examples of
their moral behavior.

Chinese audiences always enjoy hearing that greatness in Chinese
culture is indigenous while decadence is solely the influence of
foreign barbarians. Collective self-criticism, unlike xenophobia, has
never been a favorite Chinese preoccupation. Chinese narcissism
differs from Western narcissism in that superiority is based not on
physical power but on social benevolence. From the Chinese historical
perspective, the defeat of civilized Athens at the hand of militant
Sparta set the entire Western civilization on the wrong footing. It
represented the triumph of barbarism from which the West has never
recovered.

The Zhou people that Confucius idolized traced their ancestry to the
mythical deity Houji, god of agriculture. This genealogical claim had
no factual basis in history. Rather, it had been invented by the Zhou
people to mask their barbaric origin as compared with the superior
culture of the preceding Shang Dynasty (1600-1028 BC), which they had
conquered and whose culture they had appropriated, just as the Romans
invented Aeneas, mythical Trojan hero, son of Anchises and Venus, as
father of their lineage to give themselves an ancestor as cultured and
ancient as those of the more sophisticated Greeks. The Tang imperial
house was at least humble enough to coopt only Laozi, a real
historical figure rather than a god.

The historic figure responsible for the flowering of Zhou culture was
Ji Dan, Duke of Zhou, known reverently as Zhougong in
Chinese. Zhougong was the third-ranking brother of the founding
Martial King (Wuwang, 1027-1025 BC) of the Zhou Dynasty. The Martial
King claimed to be a 17th-generation descendant of the god Houji, who
allegedly gave the Chinese people the gift of agriculture. In Chinese
politics, appropriation of mythical celebrities as direct ancestors of
political rulers started long before the claim by the Tang imperial
house on Laozi, founder of Taoism.

Zhougong introduced to Chinese politics the practice of hereditary
monarchy based on the principle of primogeniture. He put an end to the
ancient tribal custom of the Shang Dynasty of crowning the next
younger brother of a deceased king.

In defiance of established tradition, after the death of the Martial
King (Wuwang) of the Zhou Dynasty in 1025 BC, Zhougong, third-ranking
brother, arranged to usurp the dragon throne for his nephew, Cheng
Wang, 12-year-old son of the deceased Martial King. The move bypassed
Zhougong's older, second-ranking brother, Ji Guanxu, the
legitimate traditional heir according to ancient tribal custom. Ji
Guanxu rebelled in protest to defend his legitimate right to succeed
his deceased older brother. But he was defeated and killed in battle
by Zhougong.

Hereditary monarchy based on the principle of primogeniture as
established by Zhougong has since been viewed by historians as the
institution that launched modern political statehood out of primitive
tribal nationhood. It has been credited with having fundamentally
advanced Chinese civilization. Modernity began with the nation-state,
and in China that transition occurred more than a millennium before
the birth of Christ.

Having acted as regent for seven years on behalf of Cheng Wang
(1024-1005 BC), his under-aged nephew king, the fratricidal Zhougong
returned political power, some would say involuntarily, to the fully
grown Cheng Wang. The descendants of Cheng Wang upheld hereditary
monarchy in the Zhou Dynasty for three more centuries and firmly
established primogeniture as an unquestioned tradition in Chinese
political culture.

Zhougong gave Chinese civilization the Five Rites and the Six
Categories of Music, which form the basis of civilization. Confucian
idealism manifests human destiny in a civilization rooted in morality
as defined by the Code of Rites, without which man would revert back
to the state of wild beasts. Zhougong was credited with having
established feudalism as a socio-political order during his short
regency of only seven years. He institutionalized it with an elaborate
system of Five Rites (Wuli) that has survived the passage of time.

He also established Six Categories of Music (Liuluo) for all ritual
occasions, giving formal ceremonial expression to social
hierarchy. Confucius revered Zhougong as the father of formal Chinese
feudal culture. The son of Zhougong, by the name of Ji Baqin, had been
bestowed the First Lord of the State of Lu by Cheng Wang (1024-1005
BC), second-generation ruler of the Zhou dynasty who owed his dragon
throne to Zhougong, his third-ranking uncle. Five centuries later, the
State of Lu became the adopted home of Confucius, who had been born in
the State of Song.

However, the pragmatic descendants of Zhougong in the State of Lu did
not find appealing the revivalist advice of Confucius, even when such
advice had been derived from the purported wisdom of Zhougong, their
illustrious ancestor. Confucius, as an old sage, had to peddle his
moralist ideas in other neighboring states for a meager living. In
despair, Confucius, the frustrated rambling philosopher, was recorded
to have lamented in resignation: “It has been too long since I
last visited Zhougong in my dreams.”

The essential idea underlying the political thinking in Confucian
philosophy is that fallen men require the control of repressive
institutions to restore their innate potential for goodness. According
to Confucius, civilization is the inherent purpose of human life, not
conquest. To advance civilization is the responsibility of the wise
and the cultured, both individually and collectively. Enlightened
individuals should teach ignorant individuals. Cultured nations should
bring civilization to savage tribes.

A superior ruler should cultivate qualities of a virtuous man. His
virtue would then influence his ministers around him. They in turn
would be examples to others of lower ranks, until all men in the realm
are permeated with noble, moral aptitude. The same principle of
trickle-down morality would apply to relations between strong and weak
nations and between advanced and developing cultures and economies.

Rudyard Kipling's notion of “the white man's
burden” would be Confucian in principle, provided that one
agrees with his interpretation of the “superiority” of the
white man's culture. Modern Confucians would consider Kipling
(1865-1936) as having confused Western material progress with moral
superiority, as measured by a standard based on virtue.

Confucius would have thoroughly approved of the ideas put forth by
Plato (427-347 BC) in the Republic, in which a philosopher king rules
an ideal kingdom where all classes happily go about performing their
prescribed separate socio-economic functions.

Taoists would comment that if only life were so neat and simple, there
would be no need for philosophy.

Confucian ideas have aspects that are similar to Christian beliefs,
only down side up. Christ taught the pleasure-seeking and
power-craving Greco-Roman world to love the weak and imitate the poor,
whose souls were proclaimed as pure. Confucius taught the
materialistic Chinese to admire the virtuous and respect the highly
placed, whose characters were presumed to be moral.

The word ren, a Chinese term for human virtue, means “proper
human relationship”. Without exact equivalent in English, the
word ren is composed by combining the ideogram “man” with
the numeral 2, a concept necessitated by the plurality of mankind and
the quest for proper interpersonal relationship. It is comparable to
the Greek concept of humanity and the Christian notion of divine love,
the very foundation of Christianity.

Without exact equivalent in English, the
word ren is composed by combining the ideogram “man” with
the numeral 2, a concept necessitated by the plurality of mankind and
the quest for proper interpersonal relationship. It is comparable to
the Greek concept of humanity and the Christian notion of divine love,
the very foundation of Christianity.

Confucius' well-known admonition, “Do not unto others that
which you not wish to have done to yourself,” has been
frequently compared with Christ's teaching, “Love thy
neighbor as thyself.” Both lead to the same end, but from
opposite directions. Confucius was less intrusively interfering but,
of course, unlike Christ, he had the benefit of having met Laozi,
founder of Taoism and consummate proponent of benign
non-interference. A close parallel was proclaimed by Hillel (30 BC-AD
10), celebrated Jewish scholar and president of the Sanhedrin, in his
famous maxim: “Do not unto others that which is hateful unto
thee.”

By observing rites of Five Relationships, each individual would
clearly understand his social role, and each would voluntarily behave
according to proper observance of rites that meticulously define such
relationships. No reasonable man would challenge the propriety of the
Five Relationships (Wulun). It is the most immutable fixation of
cultural correctness in Chinese consciousness.

The Five Relationships (Wulun) governed by Confucian rites are those
of:

These relationships form the basic social structure of Chinese
society. Each component in the relationships assumes ritual
obligations and responsibility to the others at the same time he or
she enjoys privileges and due consideration accorded by the other
components.

Confucius would consider heretical the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1721-28), who would assert two millennia after Confucius that man is
good by nature but is corrupted by civilization.

Confucius would argue that without a Code of Rites (Liji) for
governing human behavior, as embedded in the ritual compendium defined
by him based on the ideas of Zhougong, human beings would be no better
than animals, which Confucius regarded with contempt. Love of animals,
a Buddhist notion, is an alien concept to Confucians, who proudly
display their species prejudice.

Confucius acknowledged man to be benign by nature but, in opposition
to Rousseau, he saw man's goodness only as an innate potential and
not as an inevitable characteristic. To Confucius, man's destiny
lies in his effort to elevate himself from savagery toward
civilization in order to fulfill his potential for good.

The ideal state rests on a stable society over which a virtuous and
benevolent sovereign/emperor rules by moral persuasion based on a Code
of Rites rather than by law. Justice would emerge from a timeless
morality that governs social behavior. Man would be orderly out of
self-respect for his own moral character rather than from fear of
punishment prescribed by law. A competent and loyal
literati-bureaucracy (shidafu) faithful to a just political order
would run the government according to moral principles rather than
following rigid legalistic rules devoid of moral content. The behavior
of the sovereign is proscribed by the Code of Rites. Nostalgic of the
idealized feudal system that purportedly had existed before the Spring
and Autumn Period (Chunqiu, 770-481 BC) in which he lived, Confucius
yearned for the restoration of the ancient Zhou socio-political
culture that existed two-and-a-half centuries before his time. He
dismissed the objectively different contemporary social realities of
his own time as merely symptoms of chaotic degeneration. Confucius
abhorred social atrophy and political anarchy. He strove incessantly
to fit the real and imperfect world into the straitjacket of his
idealized moral image. Confucianism, by placing blind faith on a
causal connection between virtue and power, would remain the main
cultural obstacle to China's periodic attempts to evolve from a
society governed by men into a society governed by law. The danger of
Confucianism lies not in its aim to endow the virtuous with power, but
in its tendency to label the powerful as virtuous. This is a problem
that cannot be solved by the rule of law, since law is generally used
by the powerful to control the weak.

Mencius claimed that the Mandate of Heaven was conditioned on virtuous
rule. Mencius (Meng-tzu, 371-288 BC), prolific apologist for
Confucius, the equivalent embodiment of St Paul and Thomas Aquinas in
Confucianism, though not venerated until the 11th century AD during
the Song Dynasty (960-1279), greatly contributed to the survival and
acceptance of the ideas of Confucius. But Mencius went further. He
argued that a ruler's authority is derived from the Mandate of
Heaven (Tianming), that such mandate is not perpetual or automatic and
that it depends on good governance worthy of a virtuous sovereign.

The concept of a Mandate of Heaven as proposed by Mencius is in fact a
challenge to the concept of the divine right of absolute monarchs. The
Mandate of Heaven can be lost through the immoral behavior of the
ruler, or failings in his responsibility for the welfare of the
people, in which case Heaven will grant another, more moral individual
a new mandate to found a new dynasty. Loyalty will inspire
loyalty. Betrayal will beget betrayal. A sovereign unworthy of his
subjects will be rejected by them. Such is the will of Heaven (Tian).

Arthurian legend in medieval lore derived from Celtic myths a Western
version of the Chinese Mandate of Heaven. Arthur, illegitimate son of
Uther Pendragon, king of Britain, having been raised incognito, was
proclaimed king after successfully withdrawing Excalibur, a magic
sword embedded in stone allegedly removable only by a true
king. Arthur ruled a happy kingdom as a noble king and fair warrior by
reigning over a round table of knights in his court at Camelot. But
his kingdom lapsed into famine and calamity when he became morally
wounded by his abuse of kingly powers. To cure Arthur's festering
moral wound, his knights embarked on a quest for the Holy Grail,
identified by Christians as the chalice of the Last Supper brought to
England by St Joseph of Arimathea.

Mencius' political outlook of imperative heavenly mandate
profoundly influences Chinese historiography, the art of official
historical recording. It tends to equate ephemeral reigns with
immorality. And it associates protracted reigns with good
government. It is a hypothesis that, in reality, is neither true nor
inevitable.

It is necessary to point out that Mencius did not condone revolutions,
however justified by immorality of the ruling political authority or
injustice in the contemporary social system. He merely used threat of
replacement of one ruler with another more enlightened to curb
behavioral excesses of despotism. To Mencius, political immorality was
always incidental but never structural. As such, he was a reformist
rather than a revolutionary.

Nicolo Machiavelli, in 1512, 18 centuries after Mencius, wrote The
Prince, which pioneered modern Western political thought by making
medieval disputes of legitimacy irrelevant. He detached politics from
all pretensions of theology and morality, firmly establishing it as a
purely secular activity and opening the door for modern Western
political science. Religious thinkers and moral philosophers would
charge that Macchiavelli glorified evil and legitimized
despotism. Legalists of the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), who preceded
publication of The Prince by 17 centuries, would have celebrated
Machiavelli as a champion of truth.

Mencius, an apologist for Confucian ethics, was Machiavellian in his
political strategy in that he deduced a virtuous reign as the most
effective form of power politics. He advocated a utilitarian theory of
morality in politics. A similar view to that of Mencius was advocated
by Thomas Hobbes almost two millennia later. Hobbes set down the logic
of modern absolutism in his book Leviathan (1651). It was published
two years after the execution of Charles I, who had been found royally
guilty of the high crime of treason by Oliver Cromwell's regicidal
Rump Parliament in commonwealth England. Hobbes, while denying all
subjects any moral right to resist the sovereign, subscribed to the
fall of a sovereign as the utilitarian result of the sovereign's
own failure in his prescribed royal obligations.

Revolts are immoral and illegal, unless they are successful
revolutions, in which case the legitimacy of the new regime becomes
unquestionable. In application to theology, God is the successful
devil; or conversely the devil is a fallen god. It is pure
Confucian-Mencian logic. As Taoists have pointed out, there are many
Confucians who evade the debate on the existence of God, but it is
hard to find one who does not find the devil everywhere, particularly
in politics.

Confucius, during his lifetime, was ambivalent about the religious
needs of the populace. “Respect the spirits and gods to keep
them distant,” he advised. He also declined a request to
elucidate on the supernatural after-life by saying: “Not even
knowing yet all there is to know about life, how can one have any
knowledge of death?” It was classic evasion.

Confucianism is in fact a secular, anti-religious force, at least in
its philosophical constitution. It downgrades other-worldly
metaphysics while it cherishes secular utility. It equates holiness
with human virtue rather than with godly divinity. According to
Confucius, man's salvation lies in his morality rather than his
piety. Confucian precepts assert that man's incentive for moral
behavior is rooted in his quest for respect from his peers rather than
for love from God. This morality abstraction finds its behavioral
manifestation through a Code of Rites that defines proper roles and
obligations of each individual within a rigidly hierarchical social
structure. Confucians are guided by a spiritual satisfaction derived
from winning immortal respect from posterity rather than by the
promise of everlasting paradise after God's judgment. They put
their faith in meticulous observance of secular rites, as opposed to
Buddhists, who worship through divine rituals of faith. Confucians
tolerate God only if belief in his existence would strengthen
man's morality.

Without denying the existence of the supernatural, Confucians assert
its irrelevance in this secular world. Since existence of God is
predicated on its belief by man, Confucianism, in advocating man's
reliance of his own morality, indirectly denies the existence of God
by denying its necessity. To preserve social order, Confucianism
instead places emphasis on prescribed human behavior within the
context of rigid social relationships through the observance of
rituals.

As righteousness precludes tolerance and morality permits no mercy,
therein lie the oppressive roots of Confucianism. Most religions
instill in their adherents fear of a God who is nevertheless
forgiving. Confucianism, more a socio-political philosophy than a
religion, distinguishes itself by preaching required observation of an
inviolable Code of Rites, the secular ritual compendium as defined by
Confucius, in which tolerance is considered as decadence and mercy as
weakness. Whereas Legalism advocates equality under the law without
mercy, Confucianism, though equally merciless, allows varying
standards of social behavior in accordance with varying ritual
stations. However, such ritual allowances are not to be construed as
tolerance for human frailty, for which Confucianism has little use.

St Augustine (354-430), who was born 905 years after Confucius, in
systematizing Christian thought defended the doctrines of original sin
and the fall of man. He thus reaffirmed the necessity of God's
grace for man's salvation, and further formulated the Church's
authority as the sole guarantor of Christian faith. The importance of
Augustine's contribution to cognition by Europeans of their need
for Christianity and to their acceptance of the orthodoxy of the
Catholic Church can be appreciated by contrasting his affirmative
theological ideas to the anti-religious precepts of Confucius.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was born 2,275 years after Confucius,
developed the theme of “Transcendental Dialectic” in his
Critic of Pure Reason (1781). Kant asserted that all theoretical
attempts to know things inherently, which he called
“nounena”, beyond observable “phenomena”, are
bound to fail. Kant showed that the three great problems of
metaphysics—God, free will and immortality—are insoluble
by speculative thought, and their existence can neither be confirmed
nor denied on theoretical grounds, nor can it be rationally
demonstrated.

In this respect, Kantian rationalism lies parallel to Confucian
spiritual utilitarianism, though each proceeds from opposite
premises. Confucius allowed belief in God only as a morality
tool. Rationally, Kant declared that the limits of reason only render
proof elusive, they do not necessarily negate belief in the existence
of God.

Kant went on to claim in his moral philosophy of categorical
imperative that existence of morality requires belief in existence of
God, free will and immortality, in contrast to the agnostic claims of
Confucius.

Buddhism, in its emphasis on a next life through rebirth after
God's judgment, resurrected the necessity of God to the Chinese
people. Mercy is all in Buddhist doctrine. Buddhist influence put a
human face on an otherwise austere Confucian culture. At the same
time, Buddhist mercy tended to invite lawlessness in secular society,
while Buddhist insistence on God's judgment on a person's
secular behavior encroached on the sovereign/emperor's claim of
totalitarian authority.

Similar to Confucian-Mencian logic that revolts are immoral and
illegal, unless they are successful revolutions in which case the
legitimacy of the new regime becomes unquestionable, John Locke in
1680 wrote Two Treaties of Government, which was not published until
10 years later, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as a
justification of a triumphant revolution. According to Locke, men
contract to form political regimes to better protect individual rights
of life, liberty and estate. Civil power to make laws and police power
to execute such laws adequately are granted to government by the
governed for the public good. Only when government betrays
society's trust may the governed legitimately refuse obedience to
government, namely when government invades the inviolable rights of
individuals and their civil institutions and degenerates from a
government of law to despotism. An unjust king provides the
justification for his own overthrow.

Locke, like Mencius two millennia before him, identified passive
consent of the governed as a prerequisite of legitimacy for the
sovereign. Confucius would insist that consent of the governed is
inherent in the Mandate of Heaven for a virtuous sovereign, a divine
right conditioned by virtue. In that respect, it differs from
unconditional divine right claimed by Louis XIV of France. However,
the concept of a Mandate of Heaven has one similarity with the concept
of divine right. According to Confucius, just rule is required as a
ritual requisite for a moral ruler, rather than a calculated
requirement for political survival. Similarly, the Sun King would view
good kingship as a character of greatness rather than as a compromise
for winning popular support.

Both Hobbes and Locke based their empiricist notions of political
legitimacy not on theological or historical arguments, but on
inductive theories of human nature and rational rules of social
contract. Confucius based his moralist notion of political legitimacy
on historical idealism derived from an idealized view of a perfect,
hierarchical human society governed by rites.

For Taoists, followers of Laozi, man-made order is arbitrary by
definition, and therefore it is always oppressive. Self-governing
anarchy would be the preferred ideal society. The only effective way
to fight the inevitably oppressive establishment would be to refuse to
participate on its terms, thus depriving the establishment of its
strategic advantage.

Mao Zedong (1893-1976), towering giant in modern Chinese history, with
apt insights on Taoist doctrines, advocated a strategy for defeating a
corrupt enemy of superior military strength through guerrilla
warfare. The strategy is summed up by the following pronouncement:
“You fight yours [ni-da ni-de]; I fight mine [wo-da
wo-de].”

The strategy ordains that, to be effective, guerrilla forces should
avoid frontal engagement with stronger and better equipped government
regular army. Instead, they should employ unconventional strategies
that would exploit advantages inherent in smaller, weaker irregular
guerrilla forces, such as ease of movement, invisibility and flexible
logistics. Such strategies would include ambushes and harassment raids
that would challenge the prestige and undermine the morale of regular
forces of the corrupt government. Such actions would expose to popular
perception the helplessness of the immoral establishment, despite its
superficial massive power, the paper tiger, as Mao would call it. Thus
such strategies would weaken the materially-stronger but morally
weaker enemy for an eventual coup de grace by popular forces of good.

Depriving an immoral enemy's regular army of offensive targets is
the first step in a strategy of wearing down a corrupt enemy of
superior force. It is classic Taoist roushu (flexible
methods). Informed of conceptual differences of key schools of Chinese
philosophy, one can understand why historiographers in China have
always been Confucian. Despite repeat, periodic draconian measures
undertaken by Legalist reformers, ranging from the unifying Qin
Dynasty (221-207 BC), during whose reign Confucian scholars were
persecuted by being buried alive and their books burned publicly, and
up to the Legalist period of the so-called Gang of Four in modern
times, when Confucian ideas were vilified and suppressed, Confucianism
survives and flourishes, often resurrected by its former attackers
from both the left and the right, for the victor's own purposes,
once power has been secured.

Feudalism in China takes the form of a centralized federalism of
autonomous local lords in which the authority of the sovereign is
symbiotically bound to, but clearly separated from, the authority of
the local lords. Unless the local lords abuse their local authority,
the emperor's authority over them, while all-inclusive in theory,
would not extend beyond federal matters in practice, particularly if
the emperor's rule is to remain moral within its ritual bounds. In
that sense, the Chinese empire was fundamentally different than the
predatory empires of Western imperialism.

Confucianism, through the Code of Rites, seeks to govern the behavior
and obligation of each person, each social class and each
socio-political unit in society. Its purpose is to facilitate the
smooth functioning and the perpetuation of the feudal
system. Therefore, the power of the sovereign/emperor, though
politically absolute, is not free from the constraints of behavior
deemed proper by Confucian values for a moral sovereign, just as the
authority of the local lords is similarly constrained. Issues of
constitutionality in the US political milieu become issues of proper
rites and befitting morality in Chinese dynastic or even contemporary
politics.

Confucian values, because they have been designed to preserve the
existing feudal system, unavoidably would run into conflict with
contemporary ideas reflective of new emerging social conditions. It is
in the context of its inherent hostility toward progress and its
penchant for obsolete nostalgia that Confucian values, rather than
feudalism itself, become culturally oppressive and socially
damaging. When Chinese revolutionaries throughout history, and
particularly in the late 18th and early 19th century, would rebel
against the cultural oppression of reactionary Confucianism, they
would simplistically and conveniently link it synonymously with
political feudalism. These revolutionaries would succeed in
dismantling the formal governmental structure of political feudalism
because it is the more visible target. Their success is due also to
the terminal decadence of the decrepit governmental machinery of dying
dynasties, such as the ruling house of the three-century-old, dying
Qing Dynasty (1583-1911). Unfortunately, these triumphant
revolutionaries in politics remained largely ineffective in remolding
Confucian dominance in feudal culture, even among the progressive
intelligentsia.

Almost a century after the fall of the feudal Qing Dynasty house in
1911, after countless movements of reform and revolution, ranging from
Western moderate democratic liberalism to extremist Bolshevik
radicalism, China would have yet to find an workable alternative to
the feudal political culture that would be intrinsically sympathetic
to its social traditions. Chinese revolutions, including the modern
revolution that began in 1911, through its various metamorphoses over
the span of almost four millennia, in overthrowing successive
political regimes of transplanted feudalism, repeatedly killed
successive infected patients in the form of virulent governments. But
they failed repeatedly to sterilize the infectious virus of
Confucianism in its feudal political culture.

The modern destruction of political feudalism produce administrative
chaos and social instability in China until the founding of the
People's Republic in 1949. But Confucianism still appeared alive
and well as cultural feudalism, even under Communist rule. It
continued to instill its victims with an instinctive hostility toward
new ideas, especially if they were of foreign origin. Confucianism
adhered to an ideological rigidity that amounted to blindness to
objective problem-solving. Almost a century of recurring cycles of
modernization movements, either Nationalist or Marxist, did not manage
even a slight dent in the all-controlling precepts of Confucianism in
the Chinese mind. Worse, these movements often mistook Westernization
as modernization, moving toward militant barbarism as the new
civilization.

In fact, in 1928, when the Chinese Communist Party attempted to
introduce a soviet system of government by elected councils in areas
of northern China under its control, many of the peasants earnestly
thought a new “Soviet” dynasty was being founded by a new
emperor by the name of So Viet.

During the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution of 1966, the debate
between Confucianism and Legalism was resurrected as allegorical
dialogue for contemporary political struggle. At the dawn of the 21st
century, Confucianism remained alive and well under both governments
on Chinese soil on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, regardless of
political ideology. Modern China was still a society in search of an
emperor figure and a country governed by feudal relationships, but
devoid of a compatible political vehicle that could turn these
tenacious, traditional social instincts toward constructive purposes,
instead of allowing them to manifest themselves as practices of
corruption. The Western notion of rule of law has little to contribute
to that search.

General Douglas MacArthur presented post-World War II Japan, which has
been seminally influenced by Chinese culture for 14 centuries, with
the greatest gift a victor in war has ever presented the vanquished:
the retention of its secularized emperor, despite the Japanese
emperor's less-than-benign role in planning the war and in
condoning war crimes. Thus MacArthur, in preserving a traditional
cultural milieu in which democratic political processes could be
adopted without the danger of a socio-cultural vacuum, laid the
socio-political foundation for Japan as a postwar economic
power. There is logic in observing that the aggressive expansion of
Japan would not have occurred had the Meiji Restoration not adopted
Western modernization as a path to power. It was Japan's aping of
British imperialism that launched it toward its militarism that led to
its role in World War II. Of the three great revolutions in modern
history—the French, the Chinese and the Russian—each
overthrew feudal monarchial systems to introduce idealized Western
democratic alternatives that would have difficulty holding the country
together without periods of terror. The French and Russian Revolutions
both made the fundamental and tragic error of revolutionary regicide
and suffered decades of social and political dislocation as a result,
with little if any socio-political benefit in return. In France, it
would not even prevent eventual restoration imposed externally by
foreign victors. The Chinese revolution in 1911 was not plagued by
regicide, but it prematurely dismantled political feudalism before it
had a chance to develop a workable alternative, plunging the country
into decades of warlord rule.

Worse still, it left largely undisturbed a Confucian culture while it
demolished its political vehicle. The result was that eight decades
after the fall the last dynastic house, the culture-bound nation would
still be groping for an appropriate and workable political system,
regardless of ideology. Mao Zedong understood this problem and tried
to combat it by launching the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution in
1966. But even after a decade of enormous social upheaval, tragic
personal sufferings, fundamental economic dislocation and unparalleled
diplomatic isolation, the Cultural Revolution would achieve little
except serious damage to the nation's physical and socio-economic
infrastructure, to the prestige of the Chinese Communist Party, not to
mention the loss of popular support, and total bankruptcy of
revolutionary zeal among even loyal party cadres.

It would be unrealistic to expect the revival of imperial monarchy in
modern China. Once a political institution is overthrown, all the
king's men cannot put it together again. Yet the modern political
system in China, despite its revolutionary clothing and radical
rhetoric, is still fundamentally feudal, both in the manner in which
power is distributed and in its administrative structure. When it
comes to succession politics, a process more orderly than the
hereditary feudal tradition of primogeniture will have to be developed
in China.

History has shown that the West can offer little to the non-Western
world beyond rationalization of oppression and technologies of
exploitation. If after four centuries of Western modernity the world
is still beset with violence, hunger, exploitation and weapons of mass
destruction on an unprecedented scale, it follows that its Mandate of
Heaven is in jeopardy.

Part 4: Taoism and modernity

To Taoists, modernity is a meaningless concept because truth is
timeless and life goes in circles. In post-modern thinking in the
West, much of the awareness that Taoists have entertained for
centuries is just now surfacing. Even in military strategy, Sun
Tzu's On the Art of War (Sunzi Bingfa), an ancient Taoist military
treatise (500 BC), is now much in vogue in this modern age of weapons
of mass destruction and remote-controlled precision bombs.

Historians are uncertain of the historical facts regarding Laozi,
founder of Taoism. The name itself casts doubt on Laozi's
identity. Ad verbum, it simply means “old
sage”. Colloquially, the term laozi in modern Chinese has come
to mean an arrogant version of “yours truly”. The earliest
documented information on Laozi appears in the classic Records of the
Historian (Shi Ji), written by historian Sima Qian in 108 BC during
the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220). It describes Laozi as a person named
Li Er (born around 604 BC) who worked as a librarian in the court of
the State of Eastern Zhou (Dong Zhou) during the Spring and Autumn
Period (Chunqiu, 770-481 BC).

Laozi was reported to have met only once the young Confucius
(Kongfuzi, 551-479 BC), who was 53 years his junior. If intellectual
exchanges took place at that celebrated meeting, Confucius had to be
at least in his late 20s, thus placing Laozi in his 80s when the two
sages purportedly met. Confucius did not become widely known until 500
BC at the age of 51, which would put Laozi's age at 104 if they
met as two intellectual celebrities. No wonder the pundit was called
“old sage”.

Laozi is generally accepted as author of the Classic of the Virtuous
Path (Daode Jing), although evidence has been uncovered to suggest
that it was actually written by others long after his time, albeit
based on ideas ascribed to him. The Book of Virtuous Path is written
in a style that is both cryptic and enigmatic. The true meanings of
its messages are difficult to elucidate definitively. Its main
attraction lies in the requirement of active reader participation for
receiving the full benefit of its mystic insights. Each reading
solicits new levels of insights from the reader depending on his or
her experience, mood, mental alertness and preoccupation. It asks
questions rather than provides answers. It is a book of revelation
with an effect similar to what the Bible has on devoted Christians.

Zhuangzhou, a Zhou Dynasty skeptic and mystic who lived in 4th century
BC, in his classic Zhuangzi expounded on many of Laozi's doctrines
with original insight, ingenious construct, incisive witticism and
delightful charm. Drawing on Taoist concepts, Zhuangzhou opposed and
ridiculed the moral utilitarianism of Confucius.

Tao or Dao, a Chinese word meaning “way” or
“path”, delineates an enlightened perception of the
mysterious ways of life. The path of life is revealed professedly only
through spontaneous insights and creative breakthroughs. The
alternating, self-renewing and circular phenomenon of nature such as
day following night following day is an illuminating Taoist
paradigm. The life-regenerating cycle of the seasons is another
example. Taoists believe all in life to be inseparably
interrelated. Taoists consider conventional wisdom illusionary. They
point out that concepts are merely cognitive extremes of a
consciousness continuum. Extremes exist only as contrasting points to
give distinctive meanings to the unthinking, but in truth, these
extremes are inseparable interdependent polarities. There can be no
life without death, no goodness without evil and no happiness without
tragedy. Light shines only in darkness. We only know something has
been forgotten after we remember it. There is no modernity without
tradition. Behind this dualistic illusion, a unifying, primary
principle of life endures. It is called Tao.

To Taoists, the essence of life can be appreciated by observing the
flow of water. The word “alive” (huo) in the Chinese
language is composed of the root sign representing “water”
(shui) and the modifying sign representing “tongue” (she),
suggesting that flowing speech is the essence of living. Water, that
fluid substance with no shape of its own, is capable of assuming the
most intricate shapes of its containers. Any substance with a rigid
form becomes prisoner to that form, unable to adopt to changing
surroundings. Humans, whose lives are subject to infinite constraints,
should attempt to adopt the flexibility of water to accommodate the
intricate dimensions of the containers of life. Water, always taking
the path of least resistance and most natural flow, seeking rest at
the lowest point, preserving a level surface over irregular bottoms,
overcoming stubborn obstacles, smoothing rough surfaces and rounding
sharp edges of hard materials, provides a Taoist model for an
enlightened man's approach to life's imperfections. In
moderate amounts, water is a life-giving substance. In excessive
amounts, it can be cataclysmic and it can drown life. Like water, life
reacts violently and becomes destructive when forced. It can be
peaceful and good when guided gently.

According to Taoist precept, roushu (flexible method) is an approach
to be preferred over violent confrontation, which tends to be
self-defeating and counterproductive. Meditation and calm
contemplation are the means to spiritual liberation. They are the true
instruments to man's salvation from obsessive fixations and from
illusionary and distracting agitations of the physical senses. To
attain without effort is nature's way. To attain with forced
effort is an unenlightened man's folly which will always be
self-defeating. Judo, the Japanese art of physical combat that seeks
to turn the opponent's own strength against himself, is derived
from a Tang Taoist fighting style called roushu. The US “war on
terror” has yet to understand the effectiveness of roushu, and
until it does, it will remain self-defeating. Force produces
counterforce. The use of fear as a deterrence operates like a
concentric mirror, reflecting fear back on the point of initial
radiation.

Every action reduces the range of one's options. Not taking
premature or unnecessary actions keeps all of one's options open,
so that the most appropriate action remains available. Actions always
elicit reactions. Each action taken provokes reactions from all
quarters that, taken together, are always more powerful than the
precipitous action itself. It is the ultimate definition of the
inescapable law of unintended consequences.

To follow the dao (path) of life is to go with the natural flow of
life and to avoid going against it. The ethical theories of Taoism
lean toward passive resistance, believing that evil, by definition,
will ultimately destroy even itself without undue interference.

Yet it would be a mistake to regard Taoism as fatalistic and
pessimistic, instead of the ultimate sophistication in optimism that
it is. Controlled quantities of the bad can be good. Excessive amounts
of the good can be bad. Poison kills. But when handled properly, it
can cure diseases. Without poison, there can be no medicine. To employ
poison to attack poison is a Taoist principle, which is validated in
modern medical the practice of vaccination, the use of antibiotics and
chemotherapy treatments.

Only by not applying effort can one achieve that state in which
nothing is not attainable effortlessly (wu-wei ze
wu-suo-bu-wei). Every Taoist knows this famous Taoist assertion,
although none can fully explain it. Translated, it reads literally:
Only by avoiding effort can one achieve that state in which nothing is
not attainable effortlessly. This well-known Taoist assertion, the
inherent paradox of which defies logic, is still effortlessly driving
modern students of Chinese philosophy insane.

A person's role in modern economic life, when observed with
detached insight, illustrates the truth of the famous Taoist dilemma
of aiming to be effortless.

Before one chooses a profession, one has the option of a wide range of
endeavors with which to satisfy one's interest and to enable one
to be useful in life. One can become a philosopher, an artist, a
politician, a teacher, a scientist, a lawyer, a doctor, etc. As soon
as one decides to be a lawyer, for example, then one can no longer
afford to spend much time on other fields of endeavor, thus greatly
narrowing one's options. If, in order to be the best in one's
field, one devotes all of one's time and effort to the study of
law and nothing else, one ends up being ignorant of other aspects of
life. One can therefore end up aimlessly as a useless expert. Thus the
exclusive study of law may neutralize one's original purpose which
is to lead a useful life by promoting justice. For a specialization to
be truly useful, it needs to be defined so inclusively that excessive
specialization itself becomes a pitfall to avoid. The corollary: the
desire for one's objective will block one's attainment of
it. This is so because the distracting impact of one's desire will
obscure one's focus on the objective itself.

It is better not to act unless and until one is certain such action
will not foreclose other options, rendering one paralyzed. But fear of
action is paralysis itself. Unenlightened persons seek fame and
fortune to achieve happiness, only to find that through obsessive
seeking of fame and fortune, they destroy the very chance for
happiness. They mistakenly regard fame and fortune, superficial
trappings of happiness, as happiness itself. They slave after fame and
fortune without realizing that it is that very slavery that will rob
them of their happiness. Incidentally, “happiness” in the
Chinese language is expressed by the term kuai-huo, which literally
means “fast-living”.

It is a Taoist axiom that intellectual scholarship and analytical
logic can only serve to dissect and categorize information. Knowledge,
different from information, is achieved only through
knowing. Ultimately, only intuitive understanding can provide
wisdom. Truth, while elusive, exists. But it is obscured by search,
because purposeful search will inevitably mislead the searcher from
truth. By focusing on the purpose, the searcher can only find what he
is looking for. How does one know what questions to ask about truth if
one does not know what the elusive answers should be? Conversely, if
one knows already what the answers should be, why does one need to ask
questions? Lewis Carroll's Alice in Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) would unknowingly be a Taoist.

Taoists believe that the dao (path) of life, since it eludes taxonomic
definition and intellectual pursuit, can only be intuitively
experienced through mystic meditation, by special breathing exercises
and sexual techniques to enhance the mind and harmonize the body. They
believe that these mind-purifying undertakings, coupled with an
ascetic lifestyle and lean diet, would also serve to prolong
life. Taoist philosophy is referred to as Xuanxue, literally
“mystic learning”.

Taoists consider the duty of a ruler to be that of protecting with
minimal interference his subjects from harm, often from themselves,
thus avoiding the overriding injury that excessive intervention would
bring. A truly wise ruler should act in the way nature's unseen
hand gently protects the good, the definition of which is complex and
philosophical. The word “governance” (zhi) in Chinese is
composed of the root sign of “water” (shui) and the
modifying sign of “platform” (tai), suggesting that to
govern is similar to preserving stability of a floating platform on
water. Excessive and unbalanced interference, even when motivated by
good intention, does not always produce good results. Periodic, mild
famines may be considered good in the long run because the people will
learn lessons from them on the need for grain storage. Excessive
prosperity may be considered bad because it leads to wasteful
consumption with environmental and spiritual pollution that eventually
will destroy the good life. Present-day economists would come to
appreciate the desirability of sustainable balanced moderate economic
growth over the alternative of fluctuating booms and busts.

Taoists consider Confucian reliance on the Code of Rites (Liji) to
guide socio-political behavior as oppressive and self-defeating. The
Code of Rites is the ritual compendium as defined by Confucius to
prescribe proper individual behavior in a hierarchical
society. Taoists regard blind Confucian penchant for moralistic
coercion as misguided. Such coercion neglects the true power of roushu
(flexible method). Taoists think that ultimately, great success always
leads to great failure because each successful stage makes the next
stage more difficult until, by definition, failure inevitably
results. To Taoists, the assertion that nothing succeeds like success
is false. In truth, nothing fails like success. Success is always the
root of future failure.

Since the only way to avoid the trap of life's vicious circle is
to limit one's ambition, why not eliminate ambition entirely?
Would that not ensure success in life? But a little ambition is a good
thing. Total elimination, even of undesirables, is an extreme
solution, and it is therefore self-defeating. Besides, the paradox is
that eliminating all goals is itself a goal, thus guaranteeing
built-in failure. An example of this is the futility of a compulsive
organizer who makes a list of ways to relax. From the traveler's
point of view, no matter how many times he changes direction, he
always ends up where he is heading. Life is a prison from which one
can escape only if one does not try to escape. It is the desire to
escape that makes a place a prison, and the desire to return that
makes it a home. Home is not where one is, it is where one wants to
return.

Taoism as religion is generally regarded by intellectuals as a
corruption of its essence as philosophy. Having evolved originally
from a mystic search for truth, Taoism has gradually degenerated into
practices of secular alchemy aiming to achieve the transformation of
commonplace metals into gold, and to discover cures for diseases and
formulae for longevity and secrets to immortality.

The historical justification for this censorious view of Taoism as
religion gone awry comes from Taoist movements such as the Yellow
Turbans Disturbance (Huangjin Huo). It is so labeled by the
contemptuous Confucian establishment. Beginning around AD 170, shortly
before the final collapse of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), roaming
bands of disaffected peasants mounted a decade-long disruption of the
peace in the provinces. Eventually, in AD 184, exploiting aggravating
dislocations caused by floods along lower Yellow River (Huanghe), a
messianic mass movement of social revolution developed in areas
between modern-day Shandong and Henan provinces.

Historians call the movement the Yellow Turbans Peasant Rebellion
(Huangjin Minbian) because its peasant members identified themselves
by wearing yellow turbans around their heads. It was the first major
peasant revolt in Chinese history. The leader of the rebellion was
Zhang Jiao, chief patriarch of the Taoist sect of the Way of Celestial
Peace (Taiping Dao). Zhang Jiao had been an unsuccessful candidate in
keju (public examinations) for officialdom. While gathering herbal
medicine in the mountainous wilderness, he allegedly met an old sage
named the South China Ancient Sage (Nanhua Laoxian) from whom he
received the three-volume Celestial Peace Methods (Taiping Yaoshe). A
talented propagandist and messianic faith-healer, Zhang Jiao
proclaimed himself pope of a new religion based on a synthesis of
Huangdi (Yellow Emperor), primeval mythical sovereign, and a deified
Laozi, founder of Taoism.

Huangdi is the ritual appellation adopted by the first monarch in
Chinese history, a man named Gongsun, allegedly born on the celestial
star Xuanyuan. Legend has it that Huangdi established the first
kingdom in history at Youxiong, around Zhengzhou in modern-day Henan
province. During his reign, language, costume, architecture, money,
measure, medicine and music were professedly invented.

All Chinese consider themselves descendants of Huangdi. Huang (yellow)
is the color of ripe wheat. The concept of “yellow”
commands a mythical meaning in Chinese culture, signifying regality,
prosperity and civilization, all symbolized by the color of golden
harvest.

The Yellow Turbans, with a theocratic organization of more than
500,000 zealous cadres leading an army of 360,000 at the height of its
influence in AD 184, were ruled with supreme power by Zhang Jiao and
his two brothers. The three brothers, as the Trinity of Lords of
Heaven, Earth and Men respectively, were supported by a hierarchy of
militarized clergy. Communal living was practiced with regular public
confessions, mass participation in spiritual trances and orgiastic
ceremonies in which men and women engaged in prolonged kisses to
“balance their vital vapor (luoji)”. Diseases were
considered consequences of sin and were believed to be curable by
healing amulets applied to affected parts of the body and therapeutic
charms worn around the neck or waist.

The Yellow Turbans Rebellion was finally suppressed by renegade army
commanders of the falling Han Dynasty who became independent warlords
and who kept China fragmented for three more centuries, after AD 220,
before Yang Jian reunited the country by founding the Sui Dynasty in
581.

Near Luoyang, 65 kilometers southeast, in Songshan, epicenter of
Chinese Buddhist geo-cosmology, is situated the legendary Shaolin Si
(Young Forest Temple). Shaolin Si (aka Shaolin Temple) is the
birthplace of Chan Buddhism and the epic cradle of Chinese martial
arts. The warring skills of the sengs of Shaolin Si have been famous
since the 4th century AD. Even in modern times, tourists from the
world over flock to this monastery to visit this center of wushu, the
martial art known popularly as gongfu (commonly referred to in English
as “kung fu”). Shaolinquan (Shaolin-style Boxing) is the
illustrious style of martial arts that traces its origin to Shaolin Si
at the time of its founding. Shaolin Si was founded by an Indian
prince of Persian-Samarkand roots named Boddhidharma (Da’mo in
Chinese) during the Bei Wei Dynasty (Northern Wei, 386-534) in the 4th
century. Boddhidharma was the founder of a sect (zong) of Buddhism
known as Chan, later known as Zen Buddhism in Japan and the West.

Chan is a Chinese transfiguration of the Sanskrit word dhyana, meaning
“contemplation for truth”, while Zen is its Japanese
pronunciation and Yoga is its equivalent in Sanskrit. Chan precepts
assert that intellectual effort, good work, performance of rituals and
other traditional Buddhist practices are not only of little inherent
merit but also are often hindrances to the quest for true insight into
the enlightened meaning of reality. Spiritual salvation can only be
found by introspective inquiries into one's inner soul. Purity
surpasses all.

After its import to China from India, Chan Buddhism in Tang China
derived an anti-scholastic, anti-textual and anti-exegetical bias from
the mystic teachings of Taoism (Dao Jia xuanxue).

Shortly after his death, Boddhidharma was reportedly seen in person at
Mount Cong (Congling) of Songshan by Song Yun, an official of the
court of Bei Wei. The disciples of Bodhidharma excavated their
master's grave after the miraculous incident, only to find his
discarded burial clothes sans body. Something similar happened to a
man named Jesus. Ascension to heaven for the pure of soul while alive
is an ancient notion in Taoist concepts, although ascension after
death is more a Christian notion than a Taoist one. The Virgin Mary is
declared by Pope Pius XII's 1950 bull Munificentissimus Deus, as
an article of faith, to have been “assumed” directly into
heaven in the body. Imperial Prince Jin, a Taoist holy prince, the
pious son of Emperor Lin of the ancient Zhou Dynasty (1027-256 BC) who
ruled from 571-546 BC, was reported to have ascended to heaven before
death, riding a white crane.

Chan (Zen) teaching stresses spontaneous oral instructions, Socratic
in style, through the use of mystical paradoxes to reach beyond the
rigid limits of deductive logic. It also derives from Taoist mystical
teaching a love of nature and a preference for the rustic, ascetic
life. Simplicity and purity are the highest goals of Chan spiritual
attainment. The key concept in Chan philosophy is xu (void). Voidness
is the fullest attainment from existence. Nothingness is all and all
is nothingness: the ultimate nihilism.

Chan Buddhism in time split into the Northern and Southern sects,
headed respectively by Chenxiu and Hui’neng. Chenxiu and
Hui’neng were both disciples of the late Master Hongren, the
fifth patriarch after the founder of Chan Buddhism, Boddhidharma
(Da’mo) of Songshan. When quizzed by the late Master Hongren at
his deathbed, in a test to select the master's successor, about
the extent of their respective enlightenment, Chenxiu, the
master's protege, proclaimed that his enlightenment was comparable
to the sacred banyan tree and his heart was as calm as an alter
mirror. To his fellow monk's flowery assertion of having attained
an immaculate state of xu, Hui’neng dispassionately proclaimed
the famous counter-remark: “Fundamentally, there is no
significance in the banyan tree; and there is no magic in a mirror. To
be truly enlightened, these material things ought to have no
meaning.”

After the death of Master Hongren in 647, Chenxiu went south to
Jingzhou, in modern-day Hubei province, leaving their master's
legacy at Xiaolin Si in Songshan to his more enlightened fellow seng
(Buddhist monk). But Hui’neng, in keeping with true
enlightenment, elected to retire farther south with his
counter-culture sect to Shaozhou, in modern-day Hunan province, to
shun the undesirable pollution of unsolicited celebrity, thus becoming
known as the Southern Sect (Nanzong). Headed by Chenxiu, the Northern
Sect (Beizong), so named because Hui’neng's sect had gone
farther south, placed emphasis on teachings and gradual, incremental
enlightenment.

By contrast, the Southern Sect, headed by Hui’neng, places
emphasis on inspiration rather than teaching, and emphasizes
insightful flashes in place of gradual understanding for attaining
enlightenment. The Southern Sect spread widely in subsequent centuries
without organized evangelism.

After Hui’neng, master of the Southern Sect (Nanzong), settled
at Shao Mountain in Shaozhou, legend has it that all the wild tigers
and leopards, which previously had roamed the wilderness and menaced
the nearby population, miraculously disappeared, causing his
reputation of holiness to spread. Modern-day wildlife preservationists
would not have found Hui’neng's achievements admirable.

Chenxiu repeatedly invited Hui’neng to court, but the Master of
the Southern Sect, true to his Chan (Zen) principles, declined each
time. Chenxiu finally wrote personally to Hui’neng to implore
him to come to court, but Hui’neng continued to decline
steadfastly and is reported to have said dispassionately to the
messenger sent by Chenxiu: “My form is ugly. When the northern
soil sees it, I am afraid no respect for my methods would be
forthcoming. Besides, my master felt that the Southern Sect and I are
of the same destiny. It should be not altered.” Hui’neng
died without ever going north.

The Southern Sect of Hui’neng flourished in succeeding centuries
while the Northern Sect of Chenxiu, despite imperial sponsorship,
withered into a minor, esoteric cult. The history of these two sects
illustrates that glory is ephemeral while enlightenment endures.

Hui’neng's Southern Sect was later divided into Qingyuan
(Pure Spring) and Nanyue (South Mount) movements. The Qingyuan
movement evolved into three branches, Cao’dong (Cave of Cao),
Yunmen (Gate of Cloud) and Fayan (Method's Eye). The Nanyue
movement further evolved into two branches: Linji (Reach Charity) and
Weiyang (Active Respect).

Chan (Zen) Buddhism was introduced to Japan by Japanese monks who had
visited China, particularly Eisai (1141-1215), who brought back the
Linji sect (Rinzai in Japanese) in 1191, and his disciple Dogen
(1200-53), who imported the Cao’dong sect (Soto in Japanese) in
1277.

In Japan, Zen emphasis on personal character and discipline, combined
with commitment on worldly activism, became the spiritual ideals of
the medieval Samurai class. Zen monasteries such as those in Kyoto and
Kamakura became religious, intellectual and artistic centers. Zen
Buddhism was suppressed in Japan after the Meiji Restoration
(1867-68), when nationalistic Shinto religious movements were
officially encouraged. Nevertheless, Zen Buddhism remains the most
popular Buddhist sect in Japan today.

US General Douglas MacArthur compelled Japanese Emperor Hirohito to
disavow divinity in the historic 1946 New Year rescript, temporarily
dismantling the fundamental foundation of state Shintoism. The
deification traditionally implied in the title of Heaven Emperor
(Tianhuang), in use since the 7th century by all Japanese monarchs,
and the same title originally used by the High Heritage Emperor
(Gaozong) of the Tang Dynasty of China, is now forsaken, though the
use of the title itself is preserved. To many traditional Japanese,
despite intellectual disavowal, the Heaven Emperor is still a godly
figure, as the title literally suggests.

MacArthur also forbade occupied Japan to use public funds for the
support of state Shintoism, which had been identified with Japanese
militarism. In less than a decade after the defeat of Japan by the
Allies, Shintoism experienced a revival in Japan, particularly in
right-wing politics, while Rinzai Zen (Linji Chan in Chinese) gained
considerable following in the United States after World War II,
largely because of the devotion of returning Americans favorably
exposed to the ascetic sect.

Chan Buddhism became influential in China only after the 10th century,
together with the other popular Buddhist movement known as the Pure
Land (Jingtu) sect, which practiced the invocation of the name of
Amita Buddha (Amituofo) as an expression of the acceptance of fate and
the rejection of futile secular anxiety. Amita Buddha (Amituofo) was
the supreme master of a class of Mahayana deities who supposedly
resided in the Western Paradise known as Jingtu (Pure Land). Along
with other Mahayana sects, the Jingtu sect believed that any
individual, if he or she devoted his or her life to doing good, could
become a Boddhisattva, a deity worshipped in Mahayana Buddhism who,
having achieved enlightenment, compassionately refrains from entering
nirvana in order to save others.

However, the Jingtu sect, with branches named Shandao (Good Way, Jodo
in Japanese) and Ci’min (Merciful Union, Shin in Japanese),
promised a heavenly salvation in Jingtu, the Western Paradise of Amita
Buddha, for the devotee of unshakable faith, which supersedes good
works in importance. The true believer could even eat meat, indulge in
sexual pleasure and maintain secular families without compromising his
holiness, a practice condoned by the Japanese Shin sect for its
priests in modern times.

While in its most vigorous form, Jingtu Buddhism encompasses the
ultra-sophistication of the Taoist concept of the necessary function
of temptation, the absence of which negates the possibility of virtue,
it is also a concept most vulnerable to unprincipled abuse by those
less than vigorous in piety and by outright charlatans. For while the
ordeal of temptation may provide the opportunity to manifest
commitment to holiness, the surrender to temptation itself cannot be
proof of having achieved holiness.

Feodor Dostoyevsky (1812-81) asserted in a fearful warning: “If
God does not exist, everything is permitted.” To that, Jingtu
Buddhists would respond: “Only if God exists everything is
permitted.” Voltaire was right when he said that if God does not
exist, man (both Dostoyevsky and the Jingtu Buddhists) would have to
invent him.

The atheists' denial of the existence of God, maintained with
equal disregard for rationality as their believer opponents, is not as
dangerous as their corollary claim of God's irrelevance. Atheists
would suffer the penalty of being the sure loser of Pascal's
wager.

Blaise Pascal (1632-62), French mathematician, scientist, founder of
the theory of probability, and religious philosopher, was an
anti-Jesuit Jansenite who, following Antoine Arnauld of the Sorbonne,
ran afoul of the Church for his controversial
predestinarianism. Pascal argued that while the inadequacy of reason
cannot resolve questions of divinity, it is safer to bet on the
possibility of the existence of God, because the penalty for error
would be minor and the reward of being right would be
infinite. Believing in a non-existent God would do us no harm, and
believing in an existent God would grant us the grace of
heaven. Conversely, denying a non-existing God would win us nothing,
while denying an existent God would land us in hell. Pascal offered
the world a perfect hedge.

One could argue, however, that believing in something not true is not
harmless, and God, being omnipotent and all-knowing, would sympathize
with an intelligent man's honest obligation to reject blind faith,
and would discount a calculating faith based on opportunism. So a
Cartesian doubt appears an intelligent option for an unknowable
question. It led Rene Descartes (1596-1650) to his famous conclusion,
cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), which proves the existence
of the thinking mind but leaves the question of God not satisfactorily
answered. Descartes inverted claim made three centuries earlier by
Thomas Aquinas that the experience of God is implied by the general
facts of the universe, by claiming that these facts could not be known
without a knowledge of God.

The less-than-satisfactory assertions of both Aquinas and Descartes
issued an invitation two centuries later to agnosticism, a term coined
by Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), English biologist and
educator. Aspects of agnosticism are in fact classic Taoist
prepositions, certainly the parts concerning doubts, if not the parts
placing faith in rational inquiry and scientific methods. Thomas
Huxley, grandfather of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) of Brave New World
fame, doubted all things not immediately open to logical analysis and
scientific verification, and held up truth as an ideal state,
scientific methods as the tools of truth and evolution as the fruit of
truth. Ironically, Aldous, the grandson of Thomas, after three
generations of conspicuous Huxleyan scientific piety, wrote an
earth-shaking novel on the horrors and futility of scientific
progress. The Taoist notion of life going in full circles is once
again demonstrated in the Huxley saga.

Confucian scholars throughout the ages remained ambivalent toward Chan
Buddhism. Liu Zongyuan (773-819), the neo-Confucian author of a
classic apology for feudalism titled Discourse on Feudalism (Fengjian
Lun), composed a famous poem titled “Studying Chan Sutra”
(Du Chan Jing), expressing his skepticism of Chan mysticism and his
admiration for Taoist enlightenment (inadequately translated by this
writer):

Drawing from a well to rinse cold chattering teeth,
With a pure heart casting off secular trappings;
Leisurely holding the Buddhist sutra,
Pacing from the east den while studying.

The fundamental truth not being understood,
Absurd claims become society's pursuits;
Wishing for depth from past writings,
Can nature be affected by memorizing?

The garden of the Taoist is placid,
Green moss links verdant bamboo;
The sun pierces through the morning mist,
The green firs appear coated with ointment,
Insipidly hard to verbalize,
Sanguine perception replenishes a heart self-gratified.

Taoist enlightenment is the diametrical opposite of the West's
notion of enlightenment as presented during the Age of Reason, also
known as the Age of Enlightenment, hailed by Western scholars as the
root of modernity.

Part V: The Enlightenment and modernity

The Enlightenment, generally accepted as the flowering of modernity in
the West from its Renaissance roots, is a periodization in
history. Periodization, a complex problem in history, is the attempt
to categorize or divide historical time, mentality or events into
discrete named blocks. History is in fact continuous, and so all
systems of periodization are to some extent arbitrary. History does
not end as long as the human species survives. Those who proclaim the
end of history are predicting the death of civilization, not the
victory of neo-liberalism as heaven on Earth. Imperialism and
neo-imperialism, operating with cultural hegemony, are a cancer the
invasive growth of which will kill the world as a living organism.

It is nevertheless useful to segment history so that the past can
provide lessons to the present by being conceptually organized and
significant changes over time articulated. Different peoples and
cultures have different histories, and so will need different models
of periodization. Periodizing labels constantly change and are subject
to redefinition as contemporary perceptions change. A historian may
claim that there is no such thing as modernity, or the Enlightenment
or the Renaissance, or the Nuclear Age, while others will defend the
concept. Modernity, as currently constituted in the West, can also be
viewed as a relapse of civilization toward barbarism through advanced
technology.

Many periodizing concepts apply only in specific conditions, but they
are often mistaken as universal generalities. Some have a cultural
usage (such the Romantic period, the Age of Reason or the Age of
Science or the Space Age), others refer to historical events (the Age
of Imperialism, the Depression Years or the New Deal era) and others
are defined by decimal numbering systems (the 1960s, the 16th
century).

In chronology, an era is a period reckoned from an artificially fixed
point in time, as before or after the birth of Christ: BC for Before
Christ and AD for Anno Domini (year of the Lord). There are less known
but also significant points in historical time beside the birth of
Christ. The alleged creation of the world in Jewish mythical history
is equivalent to 3761 BC, and in Byzantine history, the creation date
was 5508 BC. The founding of the city of Rome took place in 753 BC,
with subsequent years marked AUD for ad urbe condita (from the
founding of the city). The hijira marks the migration of the Prophet
Mohammed to Medina from Mecca in AD 622. Abbreviated AH, it is the
starting timepost for all Muslims.

The division between AD and BC defines history according to the birth
of one man, whose divinity is far from universally accepted. Only
about 33 percent of the world's population are Christians. The
most far-reaching date anomaly is the late setting of the beginning of
the Christian era by the Roman monk-scholar Dionysius Exiguous (died
circa AD 545), thus putting the historical birth of Christ at 4 BC,
four years before the calendar birth year of Christ. The year AD 2000
marks two chronological events in the Western calendar: a new
millennium and a new century. Its celebration marks the global
dominance of Western culture in the 20th century. The new millennium
is merely year 4398 in Chinese lunar calendar—a non-event.

The French revolutionary calendar changed the names of the months to
remove all reminders of despotic traditions, such as August, named
after the Roman emperor Augustus, July, named after Julius Caesar, and
March (mars in French), named after the Roman god of war. It made all
months 30 days equally to emphasize equality and rationality. The
names for the months in the new calendar were invented hastily, by
revolutionary dramatist Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine (1755-94),
George Jacques Danton's talented secretary who would be tragically
guillotined at the prime age of 39, a mere five years after the
storming of the Bastille, the popular uprising that launched the
French Revolution. The 12 30-day months added up to 360 days; the
remaining five days of the year, called sans-culottides, after the
name given to the members of the lower classes not wearing fancy
culottes (breeches), were to be feast days for the laboring class,
called Virtue, Genius, Labor, Reason and Rewards.

The French revolutionary calendar rejected the year of the birth of
Christ as the first Anno Domini. It replaced the seven-day week,
viewed by revolutionary zealots as an obsolete Christian relic, with
the metric 10-day decade, unwittingly causing a counterrevolutionary,
regressive reduction in the number of days of rest for the working
populace from four to three in a month. The overall purpose was to
remove from the cultural consciousness all Christian events such as
Christmas, Easter, All Saints Day, the Sabbath, etc, as part of a
program to replace Christianity with a Cult of Reason. The French
revolutionary calendar remained in effect until the Thermidorian
Reaction, a period of political revisionism, of vulgar extravagance in
social manners, of greed and scandal and of merveilleuses, women known
for their underdressed overdressing in public. The Thermidorian
Reaction was marked by the growth of corruption, inflationary
speculation and manipulative profiteering, suspension of populist
economic regulations, topped with a wholesale repeal of
de-Christianization practices.

The Thermidorian Reaction is so named because it came after the coup
d’etat of 9 Thermidor, Year III of the Republic (July 27, 1794),
that brought down Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94), thus ending the
Reign of Terror, and brought to power a convenient coalition of the
conservative old bourgeoisie and the boisterous parvenus and nouveaux
riches, which would deliver the French nation, another five years
later, to a military dictator in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Still other periodizations are derived from influential or talismanic
individuals (the Victorian era, the Elizabethan era, the Napoleonic
era or the Mao era). Some of these usages are geographically
specific. This is especially true of periodizing labels derived from
individuals or ruling elites, such as the Jacksonian era in the United
States, or the Meiji era in Japan, or the Merovingian period in
France. Cultural terms may also have a limited reach. Thus the concept
of the Romantic period may be meaningless outside of Europe and of
Europe-influenced cultures.

Yet the term “modernity” takes on universal
characteristics that spring from Western cultural hegemony. In recent
times, modernity has again been abducted as a war cry to perpetuate
the domination by the capitalist West of the rest of the
world. Previously, the Renaissance claimed modernity as a
justification against secular power of the Church, the bourgeoisie
claimed modernity as a justification against absolute monarchism, and
the socialist revolutions claimed modernity as justification against
capitalism. All these claims were associated with social progress. But
the current abduction of modernity by the capitalistic West represents
the first time in history when reaction is claimed as modernity and
barbarism as progress. The law of the jungle is celebrated as
competitive market fundamentalism, and the doctrine of “might is
right” permeates modern diplomacy, replacing morality and
legitimacy.

Periodizing terms are often tools of cultural hegemony with negative
connotation for oppressed cultures and positive connotation for the
hegemonic culture. Thus there is the Age of Monarchy in the West but
the Age of Asiatic and Oriental Tyrants in Asia and the Middle
East. The Victorian era, which is known for sexual repression, racism,
class conflict and exploitation, and imperialism, is hailed in the
West as the age of propriety, industrialization and capitalism. Other
labels such as “Renaissance” have positive characteristics
as compared with “Medieval”, despite that fact that
historians have suggested that unlike the Middle Ages, the Renaissance
failed to develop significant lasting social institutions.

The French term “Renaissance”—meaning
“rebirth” though in the English-speaking world it is
commonly known by its French name—was created by Petrarch
(Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74), an Italian humanist poet whose famous
vernacular poem inspired by his love for Laura transcended medieval
asceticism into individual expression of emotion. The term refers to
the cultural changes that occurred in Italy as a reaction to Italian
conditions of the time, which began around the quattrocento (15th
century) and culminated in what is termed the High Renaissance, at
around 1500. Many Western historians regard the Renaissance as the
beginning of modernity. Yet, the basic institutions, the great
framework of collective purpose and action by which the West continues
to operate far into the present time, all originated in the Middle
Ages. Parliaments, for example, were medieval feudal institutions. The
Magna Carta was signed by King John of England in 1215.

The Renaissance, also known as the Age of Humanism, was a period of
secularization of Western civilization. The Renaissance Church became
a secular institution in this period, shedding its spiritual roots,
with insatiable greed for material wealth and temporal power. The
Italian Renaissance produced little of what could be considered great
ideas or institutions by which men living in society could be held
together in harmony. Indeed, the greatest of all Europeans
institutions, the Roman Church, in which Europeans had lived for
centuries, fell into neglect under Renaissance popes, whose fall from
spiritual grace sparked the Reformation.

Nor did the Renaissance produce any effectual political
institutions. Unlike the medieval agricultural towns of France that
developed gradually, the trading towns of Italy prospered abruptly as
trade converged on the Mediterranean. The sudden riches from trade
held in private hands required a new culture separate from the
medieval communal spirit to rationalize its acceptability. As
merchants made obscene fortunes from trade and banking, they diverted
social criticism by sponsoring art, to glorify their worldly sins with
beauty. Successful bankers lent money to popes, kings and princes, and
with the profits they gained political control of Italian trading
towns to turn them into despotic city-states. They employed
mercenaries in the form of condottieri, private captains of armed
bands, who contracted with opposing city-states to carry on warfare,
sometime even changing sides during hostility for a better price. As
they forgot about things that money could not buy, they glorified the
power of money in a philosophy of humanism and despotism.

The most notable example was the Medici clan of Florence. Giovanni
(died 1429) founded the banking fortune that enabled his son Cosimo
de’ Medici (1389-1464) to become the de facto ruler of Florence
through populist politics. Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo the
Magnificent (1449-92), used his great wealth to govern as a
connoisseur and lavish benefactor of art and letters. Tuscany became a
duchy of which Medici men were hereditary grand dukes until the clan
died out in 1753. The clan furnished two popes and numerous cardinals
to the Church, and two Medici women became queens of France. It was
the first time in history when money led to political significance
rather than the reverse. Italian politics degenerated into a tangled
web of subterfuge and conspiracy, making no pretense to legitimacy, to
represent any moral idea or to further any social good.

The Renaissance idea of virtu (to be man) had little to do with the
medieval idea of virtue. Virtu describes the quality of being a man in
the sense of demonstrating individual human powers as expressed in the
arts, in war and statecraft. It is the root of Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche's hero and the rationale of fascism. This concept
applies dominantly to the visual arts, referring to the work of
Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. It also applies to the
emergence of capitalism, private banking, provincial despotism and
materialistic secularism. It celebrated the specific differences in
man in contrast to the medieval concept of the common generality of
man. The discovery of the rules of perspective and detailed anatomy in
drawing allowed painters to locate humanity in specific contexts
rather than symbolic generality of abstract truth. In Leonardo's
The Last Supper, Christ and his disciples were portrayed as a group of
men each having distinct individual personalities.

The Renaissance was a movement of the non-aristocratic elite minority,
exclusive in spirit in contrast to the medieval notion of
community. Renaissance individualism was the privilege of a dazzling
few. The Italian humanists were lay writers, instead of clerics or
court scribes. “Humanism” is a name given to the literary
movement of the Italian Renaissance. The pomposity of the humanists
was mocked by the populace in their own time. The humanists were in
awe of antiquity, a peculiar preoccupation for modernists. They tried
to dress, talk, and comport themselves like Roman nobles. They
disdained writing in Italian as Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio
had done. They dismissed even medieval Latin as barbaric and corrupt,
and reverted to the style of the excessively flowery language of the
schoolbook Latin of Cicero (106-43 BC), the great Roman orator whose
famous First Oration Against Catiline skillfully condemned Catiline as
a conspirator based on hearsay testimony obtained from Catiline's
mistress. Cicero, despite his rhetorical eloquence, remained unable to
substantiate his legal authority to execute Catiline's five
associates, thus subjecting himself to exile subsequently for having
put to death Roman citizens without due process of law.

The Humanist movement did not survive the test of time, the exception
being Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), who showed conclusively from the
language used in the document that the Donation of Constantine, on
which the papacy based it temporal claims, could not have been written
in Constantine's time and so was a forgery. The discovery was
welcomed by the Italian Renaissance city-state despots who were eager
to undermine the legitimacy of the papacy's temporal power.

The Renaissance invented the idea of the “gentleman”,
later emulated by the British elite. Baldassare Castiglione
(1478-1520) wrote Book of the Courtier, liberating Europeans from
their uncouth manners of publicly spitting, belching, blowing their
noses on their sleeves, snatching food with their bare hands and
general bawling and sulking openly with little inhibition. According
to Castiglione, a courtier should cultivate graceful manners in
society and poised approaches toward his equals, converse with
facility, be proficient in sports and arms, be an expert dancer with
appreciation for music and poetry and be gallant to the fair sex. He
should know Latin and Greek as a sign of good education and be
familiar with literary trends but not too engrossed. In sum, it was a
promotion of dilettantism, which as transformed into the English
gentleman of the Oxbridge variety became what many identified as the
mentality that contributed to the demise of the British Empire. It was
also the mentality of much of the British-trained Third World
elite. This mentality left the post-colonial independent nations with
a poverty of political and economic leadership after the fall of the
British Empire, from India to the Middle East, from Africa to
Asia. Such mentality has kept the former colonies from cultural and
economic revitalization from the wounds of colonialism.

Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) was Europe's first
secular treatise on politics, devoid of concern for morality,
legitimacy or justice, issues that rulers have since learned to
manipulate to rationalize their political interests. He described the
barbaric chaos of 16th-century Italy as universal modern
reality. Ironically, this perspective deprived Italy of the
development of institutions, such as the nation-state, in which men
can act in concert for a larger purpose. In a new age of rising
national monarchies, the city-states of Italy could not compete
without the protection of the spiritual and temporal power of the
Church, against which Renaissance Italy itself played a central role
in weakening. In 1494, a French army crossed the Alps and Italy became
the bone of contention between France and Spain. In 1527, a horde of
undisciplined Spanish and German mercenaries sacked Rome, killing
thousands in an orgy of rape and looting, imprisoned the pope and
mockingly paraded cardinals facing backward on mules in the
streets. Never had Rome experienced anything so horrible and
degrading, not even from the barbaric Goths of the 5th century.

The term “Middle Ages” also derived from Petrarch, who was
comparing his own period to the Ancient or Classical world, seeing his
time as a time of rebirth after a dark intermediate period, the Middle
Ages. The idea that the Middle Ages were a “middle” phase
between two other large-scale periodizing concepts—Ancient and
Modern—still persists. Smaller periodizing concepts such as Dark
Ages occur within it. Both “Dark Ages” and “Middle
Ages” still have negative connotations—the latter
especially in its Latin form “medieval”. However, other
terms, such as “Gothic” as in Gothic architecture, used to
refer to a style typical of the High Middle Ages, have largely lost
the negative connotations they initially had, only to acquire
others. Critics derisively called the French Physiocrats of the French
Enlightenment “economists” because they concerned
themselves with materialistic issues.

The Gothic and the Baroque were both named during subsequent stylistic
periods when the preceding style had become unpopular. The word
“Gothic” was applied as a pejorative term to all things
Northern European and, hence, barbarian, by Italian writers during the
15th and 16th centuries. The word baroque was used first in late 18th
century French to depict the irregular natural pearl shape and later
an architectural style perceived to be boisterously irregular and
larger than life, in comparison with the highly restrained regularity
of Neoclassical architecture. Subsequently, these terms have become
purely descriptive, and have largely lost negative
connotations. However, the term “Baroque” as applied to
art (for example Peter Paul Rubens) refers to a much earlier
historical period than when applied to music (George Frideric Handel,
Johann Sebastian Bach). This reflects the difference between stylistic
histories internal to an art form and the external chronological
history beyond it.

Gothic construction, most identifiable in popular culture by the
flying buttress, is the technological response to the medieval pious
aspiration toward light and height transformed into ecclesiastical
architecture. The boisterous Baroque was the awe-inspiring instrument
of the Counter-reformation, sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the
True Faith. Baroque architecture was the propaganda vehicle of the
Jesuits in their counter-reformation campaign and the dramatic stage
of the Inquisition. It spread quickly to all Roman Catholic
countries. King Louis XIV of France later coopted the propaganda
effectiveness of the Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism
to enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy. Modern architecture rose
from the hopes of social democratic ideals stemming from the collapse,
in the aftermath of World War I, of the European monarchies and their
attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in the system of
court-sponsored academies. While the cultured public welcomed the new
artistic philosophy, official suppression of the Modern Movement by
both Nazi Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union forced its migration
to the United States, where it was coopted into the service of
corporate capitalism after being sanitized of most of its
social-democratic program, the way modernity is now being abducted to
serve the current “war on terrorism”.

The entire Renaissance was supported by a political ideology that is
of dubious acceptability by contemporary standards. Despotism was a
boon to Italian Renaissance art and architecture. A case can be made
to condemn the Italian Renaissance as a movement of courtly pretension
and elitist taste prescribed by theme, content and form to the
questionable needs of secular potentates and ecclesiastical mania. The
noblest social art, one can argue, is that which the contribution of
multitudes create for themselves as a common gift of glory, such as
the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of ancient Greece. By contrast,
Vladimir Tatlin's monument for the Third International was an
attempt to unite artistic expression with the new socialist ideal as
the Eiffel Tower did for industrialization. The Productivist Group
maintained in its polemic that material and intellectual production
were of the same order. Leftist artists devoted their energy to making
propaganda for the new Soviet government by painting the surfaces of
all means of transport with revolutionary images to be viewed in
remote corners of the collapsing czarist empire. Constructivism
declared all-out war on bourgeois art. Alas, the revolutionary
movement met its demise not from bourgeois resistance, but from
internal doctrinal inquisition. Much of Constructivist esthetic
creativity was subsequently coopted by bourgeois society. Modernity is
socialism, but the term has been abducted by bourgeois capitalism
since the end of the Cold War.

In many cases, those living through a period are unable to identify
themselves as belonging to the “period” historians may
later assign to them. This is partly because they are unable to
predict the future, and so will not be able to tell whether they are
at the beginning, middle or end of a period. Another reason may be
that their own sense of historical development may be determined by
religions or ideologies that differ from those used by later
historians. We may well be living in the dawning of the age of
socialism, free from the false starts of the past century, and ushered
in finally by the self-destructive excesses of capitalism run amok.

It is important to recognize the difference between self-defined
historical periods and those which are later defined by historians. At
the beginning of the 20th century there was a general belief that
culture, politics and history were entering a new era—that the
new century would also be a new “era” in human
development. This belief in progress had been largely abandoned by the
end of the century with the triumph of militant reaction crowned by a
proclamation of the end of history. Yet just as the Catholic
Counter-Reformation failed to arrest the spread of the Reformation,
the capitalist reaction against the socialist revolutionary movement
since 1848 is faced with the option of including socialist programs in
the capitalist system or the replacement of capitalism by
socialism. Democracy is not the exclusive tool of the
bourgeoisie. Just as the bourgeoisie used democracy and the rebellious
power of the working class to pressure the aristocracy, the working
class will use democracy to remove the bourgeoisie from controlling
the fate of the human race.

“The Enlightenment” is a periodization term that applies
to the mainstream of thought of 18th century Europe. The scientific
and intellectual developments of the 17th century fostered the belief
in natural laws and universal order and the confidence in reason which
spread to influence 18th century society in Europe. These development
were typified by the discoveries of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the
rationalism of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Pierre Bayle
(1647-1700), the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) that equates
god with the forces and natural laws of the universe and the
empiricism of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704). A
rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political and
economic issues promoted a secular view of the world and a general
sense of progress and perfectibility.

The proponents of the Enlightenment were of one mind on certain basic
attitudes, and sought to discover and act on universally valid
principles governing humanity, nature and society. They attacked
spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship
and economic and social constraints. They considered the state the
proper and rational instrument of progress. In England, Lockean
theories of learning by sense perception were carried forward by David
Hume (1711-16). The philosophical view of rational man in harmony with
the universe set the climate for the “laissez-faire”
economics of Adam Smith (1723-90) and for the utilitarianism of Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832) of the greatest good for the greatest
number. Historical writing gained secular detachment in the work of
Edward Gibbon (1737-94). In Germany, the universities became centers
of the Enlightenment (Aufklarung). Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) set
forth a doctrine of rational process; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(1729-81), whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) credited as
having placed the young poet in the true path, advanced a natural
religion of morality; J G Herder (1744-1803) developed a philosophy of
cultural nationalism. The supreme importance of the individual formed
the basis of the ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The movement
received strong support of the rising bourgeoisie and vigorous
opposition from the high clergy and the nobility.

The strongest claim by the West on modernity is derived from ideas and
concepts generally grouped under the category of the
Enlightenment. These are ideas that were developed during the half a
century preceding the French Revolution, between 1740 and 1789, known
in history as the Age of Enlightenment. It was at the time that the
idea of progress gained popular acceptance in the West. It was a time
when Europeans emerged from a long twilight, from which the past was
considered barbaric and dark. This was the age of enlightened
thinkers, known as philosophes, and enlightened despots.

The idea of the Enlightenment was drawn from earlier sources, carried
over from the old philosophy of natural law, which held that right
depends on a universal reason, not on local conditions or on the will
or perspective of any person or group. It carried over, from the
intellectual revolution of the previous century, the ideas of Bacon
and Locke, Descartes and Newton, Bayle and Spinoza. It was
antagonistic and skeptical toward tradition, confident in the powers
of science and places faith firmly in the regularity of nature. It
most serious shortcoming was the assumption that European values
derived from European experience were universal truth and that such
truth gave license to world dominance: the rest of the world, to
escape domination and exploitation, must adopt Western ways of
militarism and exploitation. The modernization of Japan was a perfect
example of this trend.

The philosophes of the Enlightenment were mostly popularizers, in an
age when the great books were not read by the public. They reworded
the ideas of past civilizations in ways that held the interest of the
growing reading public. These philosophes were primarily men of
letters, exemplified by Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778),
who made fortunes and gained fame with his writings. They differed
from intellectuals of the past who were mostly proteges of
aristocratic or royal patrons or clerics in the Church.

The emergence of a literate middle class made such freelancers
possible. Naturally, as most writers who enjoy popularity write what
their audiences like to hear, what economist John Galbraith calls
“conventional wisdom”, the Enlightenment authors mostly
wrote to enhance the political and economic interests of the
bourgeoisie. Most of the works produced during this period focused on
the catalogue and organization of information, made entertaining with
wit and lightness. This was the age of the salon literati, of clever
one-upmanship and satire, full of innuendos and sly digs, particularly
insider jokes understood only by the enlightened few. Voltaire
attacked European society by making fun not of the French, but by
stereotyping the Persians, the Iroquois and the Chinese.

Frederick the Great of Prussia was regarded as an eminent philosophe
through his friendship with Voltaire, whose style he emulated, as was
Catherine the Great of Russia (1762-96). While Maria Teresa of Austria
(1740-80) was not a philosophe on account of her piety, her son
Joseph, brother of the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette of France (1755-93),
worked hard to become one, as a patron of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In
England, Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) tried to become one by claiming
that the Church of England as a social institution was exactly what
pure reason would have invented. Edward Gibbon (1737-94), whose
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire summarized the millennium
following the birth of Christ as “the triumph of barbarism and
religion”, much as the centuries after the Renaissance are
summarized today as the triumph of capitalistic democracy over
socialist revolutions as a religious truth. Gibbon was counted as a
philosophe for his secular outlook.

Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was not considered a philosophe. He was
fascinated by the supernatural, adhered to the established church,
deflated pretentious authors, even declared Voltaire and Jean Jacques
Rousseau (1712-78) “bad men” who should be sent to the
plantations in America.

The Enlightenment was in essence French, a product of sophisticated
Parisian salons run by the likes of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of
Louis XV, lubricated by the liberal flow of French champagne. Denis
Diderot (1713-84) was not only a card-carrying philosophe, his
Encyclopedie was described as a “reasoned dictionary”
written by a distinguished list of other philosophes who went on to
enjoy the awesome rank of Encyclopedists. Another group of philosophes
was the Physiocrats, whom critics derisively called
“economists” who concerned themselves with fiscal and
monetary reform, with measures to increase the national wealth of
France. Among the Physiocrats were Francois Quesnay (1694-1774),
physician to Louis XV (1715-74), and Dupont de Nemour (1739-1817),
whose descendants became the US industrial/chemical Dupont family.

The three giants of the philosophes were Montesquieu, Voltaire and
Rousseau. Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brede et de
Montesquieu (1533-92), a landed aristocrat, was a defender of his
class interest. Among his associates was the Count of Boulainvilliers
(1658-1722), who held that French nobility was descended from a
superior Germanic race, a view that contributed to the emergence of
racism in the West.

In his The Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu developed two principal
ideas. One was that forms of government varied according to climate
and circumstances, for example that despotism was suited more to large
empires in hot climates and that democracy only would work in small
city-states. Thus democracy is inconsistent with the idea of
empire. The other idea was the separation and balance of powers. In
France, he believed that power should be divided between the king and
a number of “intermediate bodies”—parliaments,
provincial estates, organized nobility, chartered towns, and even the
church. It was natural for Montesquieu, a judge in parliament, a
provincial and a landed nobleman, and reasonable for him to recognize
the position of the bourgeoisie of the towns, but as for the Church he
observed that while he took no stock in its teachings, he thought is
useful as an offset to undue centralization of government. Montesquieu
admired the unwritten English constitution as he understood it, not
for its democratic qualities but in believing that England carried
over, more successfully than any other European country, the feudal
liberties of the Middle Ages. To Montesquieu, government should be a
mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, a term representing
the interests of the bourgeoisie, not the general population and
definitely not workers and peasants.

The ideas of Montesquieu were well known to the drafters of the US
constitution, who, because the United States at that time had no
history of social institutions besides slavery, distorted the meaning
of democracy and the separation of powers as defined by Montesquieu to
create a political structure peculiarly suited only to US
conditions. Those who now claim that the US version of democracy is a
heritage of the Enlightenment universally suited for all humankind
have been highly selective in their understanding of history.

Strictly speaking, the modern world arrived in the 18th and 19th
centuries with the transfer of power from the aristocracy and the
absolutist kings (Louis XIV in France and James I in England) to the
upper middle classes—the elite bourgeoisie. The upper middle
classes were represented by constitutional assemblies, legislatures,
and parliaments, which took power away from the kings and aristocrats
by violent revolutions or by reform legislation: England (1688,
1830s), the United States (1776), France (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870),
Canada (1840s and 1850s), and Germany (1848, 1918). Japan embarked on
a deliberate program of “modernization” in the late 19th
century and early 20th century.

The shift of power was accompanied by the Industrial Revolution and
liberal, or free-enterprise, economic theory (laissez faire), the
economic counterpart of the middle-class political
revolutions. Critiques of this modern, elitist middle-class,
democratic, and laissez-faire industrial system emerged at various
points in the 19th century, most notably in Marxist and other
socialist movements. Although these movements of the working people
were critical of the upper-middle-class entrepreneurs who led the 18th
century and early 19th century “modern” revolutions,
Marxists and other socialists remained modern in most of their
assumptions. Thorough-going critique of the modern world view and its
rational-scientific outlook, its rationally organized economic
production system, and its rationally centralized bureaucratic
politics did not emerge until the late 19th century and early 20th
century. Such critique came at first only from philosophers such as
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), scientists such as Albert Einstein
(1879-1955), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and artists and writers. Only
in the late 20th century did such postmodern critique become
widespread. For most people in the 1980s, in Europe and North America
and increasingly around the world, modern ways of life dominated,
although intellectuals had been attacking or reinterpreting modern
views for some time.

One way to understand Western modernity is to look at countervailing
social, political and religious manifestations. As anthropologists,
sociologists and historians have studied the “traditional
village societies” that survived in a few remote areas of Europe
and in non-Western cultures, they have learned much about the nature
of the modern Western world view. The very name “traditional
society” focuses on what is perhaps the most important single
aspect. “Modern” means “now”—a world
view focusing on the now, on the latest, on the newest and the most
dominant. A traditional society takes “handed down” things
(Latin tradita) as its starting point and modifies them slowly even as
it tries to be faithful to the inherited ideas and customs. A modern
world view implicitly assumes the superiority of the latest and newest
as liberating and expansive, and almost invariably scorns the
old-fashioned as constrictive and oppressive. The confrontation of the
non-Western world with the ascending West that turned out to be
aggressively intrusive, and the rationalization of victimization as a
deserved fate of not being modern, has affected the development of the
non-Western world, particularly the ancient cultures found in China,
India and the Middle East. It forced these cultures to reject age-old
values that had evolved from centuries of struggle toward harmony to
adopt the new barbarism of domination, militarism and racism to
survive.

The clearest example is Japan, the thoroughly “modern”
Asian power. The Meiji era (1868-1912), a period historians identify
as the beginning of modern Japan, marks the reign of the Meiji emperor
during which Japan was “modernized” and rose to world
power status on a path that eventually brought it the detonation of
two atomic bombs. The Meiji Restoration ended the more than
250-year-old feudalistic Tokugawa shogunate. In 1868, 14-year-old
Mutsuhito succeeded his father, the Emperor Komei, taking the title
Meiji, meaning ironically “enlightened rule”. Considering
that the economic structure and production of the country was then
roughly equivalent to Elizabethan England, to have become a world
power in such a short amount of time is widely regarded as remarkable
progress. This process was closely guided and heavily subsidized by
the Meiji government, enhancing the power of the great zaibatsu, firms
such as Mitsubishi. Hand in hand, the zaibatsu and government
developed the modern nation, borrowing technology and cultural
concepts from the West, copying the British Empire of the Victorian
age, much the same way Japan did from Tang China in nation-building in
the 7th century. Kyoto was a scaled-down replica of the Tang capital,
Changan. Japanese mercantilist policies gradually took control of much
of Asia's markets for manufactures, beginning with textiles. The
economic structure became mercantilist, importing raw materials and
exporting finished products—a reflection of Japan's relative
poverty in raw materials, a condition similar to those found in
England.

Japan's defeat of China in Korea in the Sino-Japanese War
(1894-95) established it not as an Asian power, but as a Western power
in Asia infatuated with Western racist values, which generated much
anti-Japanese sentiment throughout Asia. Japan's breakthrough as
an international power came with its victory against Europeanized
Russia in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Allied with
Britain since 1902 against Czarist Russian expansionism in Asia, Japan
joined the Allies in World War I, seizing German-held territory in
China and the Pacific in the process, but otherwise remained largely
out of the conflict. After the war, a weakened Europe left a greater
share in international markets to the United States and Japan, both of
which emerged greatly strengthened, setting them on a path of conflict
that ended in Pearl Harbor. Japanese competition made great inroads
into hitherto European-dominated markets in Asia, not only in China,
but also even in European colonies such as British India and Dutch
Indonesia.

Japan emerged from the Tokugawa-Meiji transition as the first
industrialized nation in Asia. Domestic commercial activities and
limited foreign trade had met the demands for material culture in the
Tokugawa period, but the modernized Meiji era had radically different
requirements. From the onset, the Meiji rulers embraced the concept of
a market economy and adopted British and American forms of
free-enterprise capitalism. The private sector—in a nation
blessed with an abundance of aggressive entrepreneurs—welcomed
such change. Trade in the Confucian culture that formed Japan ranked
below prostitution in social esteem. Luckily for the merchant class,
trade was rescued from traditional social scorn through its role in
national survival. Similar evolution is currently taking place in
China, with results that are controversial at best.

Economic reforms included a unified modern currency based on the yen,
banking, commercial and tax laws, stock exchanges, and a
communications network. Establishment of a modern institutional
framework conducive to an advanced capitalist economy took time but
was put in place by the 1890s. By this time, the government had
largely relinquished direct control of the modernization process,
primarily for budgetary reasons. Many of the former daimyo, whose
pensions had been paid in a lump sum, benefited greatly through
investments they made in emerging industries. Those who had been
informally involved in foreign trade before the Meiji Restoration also
flourished. Old bakufu-serving firms that clung to their traditional
ways failed in the new business environment.

The establishment of the bakufu by Minamoto Yoritomo was the single
most transforming event of early Japan. The bakufu, or “tent
government” (because soldiers lived in tents), was more or less
a military government. It primarily functioned as a separate
government concerned principally with military and police matters. The
emperor's government in Kyoto continued to function as before: the
court still appointed civil governors, collected taxes, and exercised
complete control in the area surrounding the capital.

The real power of the state, however, became more concentrated in the
hands of the Kamakura shogun. The word shogun is a Chinese term for
“general”. Minamoto Yoritomo demanded the title Sei i tai
shogun, “barbarian-conquering great general”, when he
defeated the Taira. The shogun, and the military government beneath
him, really did not control much of Japan. For all practical purposes,
the provinces of Japan were independent even though local lords
(daimyo) who swore allegiance to the shogun.

The shogunate, however, did not remain in Minamoto clan hands for very
long. When Yoritomo died in 1199, his widow, from the clan of the
Hojo, usurped power from the Minamoto clan. She was a Buddhist nun, so
she became known as the “Nun Shogun”. She displaced the
son who had inherited from his father and installed another son, who
was soon assassinated. From that point onward, the Hojo clan ruled the
bakufu while the Minamoto clan nominally occupied the position of
shogun. The relationship between the bakufu and the imperial
government had never been very friendly; in 1221, the imperial court
led an uprising against the bakufu, but failed. By this point,
however, the ideology of loyalty had become fully ingrained in the
bakufu structure; the imperial court had little success persuading
people to break that loyalty.

The defining moment for the Kamakura bakufu was the unsuccessful
invasion of Japan by the Mongol Chinese. In 1258, Kublai Khan
conquered the Korean Peninsula and in 1266, he declared himself
emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. In 1266,
representatives of the Yuan court came to Japan and demanded
submission to Chinese rule. The imperial court was terrified, but the
Hojo clan decided to stand its ground and sent the representatives
home. In 1274, the Yuan emperor sent a vast fleet to invade Japan but
it was destroyed by a hurricane—the Japanese called this
fortunate hurricane kamikaze, or “wind from the
gods”. Again in 1281, China launched the largest amphibious
assault in the history of the ancient and medieval worlds. The Chinese
army was a terrifying invasion force. But the Hojo clan managed to
keep the Chinese from landing by building a vast seawall against the
invaders. Another hurricane again sank the Chinese fleet.

The bakufu might have saved Japan from Chinese invasion, but they
could not survive the modernization program of the Meiji
Restoration. The Meiji government was initially involved in economic
modernization, providing a number of “model factories” to
facilitate the transition to the modern period. After the first two
decades of the Meiji period, the industrial economy expanded rapidly
until about 1920 with inputs of advanced Western technology and large
private investments. Stimulated by wars and through cautious economic
planning, Japan emerged from World War I as a major industrial
nation. Its mercantilist path led it to the quest of empire in the
British fashion. After World War II, General Douglas MacArthur turned
Japan into an export dynamo in the service of the United States in the
context of the Cold War. This role became obsolete after the end of
the Cold War. The current economic crisis in Japan is rooted in issues
much deeper than Western economists have identified.

Europeans outside of Italy were much less conscious of any sudden
break with the Middle Ages. Medieval intellectual interests persisted
in the continuing founding of universities, which the Italian
humanists regarded as pedantic centers of scholastic learning. Between
1386 and 1506, no fewer than 14 universities were founded in Germany,
while no new university was founded in Italy in the 15th century. At
one of the new German universities, at Wittenburg, founded in 1502,
Marin Luther (1484-1546) launched the Reformation against the
Renaissance Church. The Scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
(1225-74) laid the foundation of European thought by calling for
exactness and disciplined thinking, and above all made Christendom
safe for reason with his doctrine that faith could not be endangered
by reason. In contrast, at about the same time, Islamic authorities
ruled that valid interpretation of the Koran had ended with the Four
Great Doctors of early Islam. “The gate was closed” was an
Islamic saying, and with it centuries of brilliant Arabic thought
withered away gradually. It is the greatest irony in intellectual
history, since it had been Arabic learning on ancient Greek culture
that helped Christian scholars rediscover Aristotelian syllogism.

The Holy Roman Empire was proclaimed in AD 962, five decades after the
German magnates elected a king in 911, who also assumed the title of
Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire was in theory coterminous
with Latin Christendom, and endowed with a special mission of
defending and extending the true faith. The Holy Roman Emperor was
never able to consolidate his political domain as did the kings of
France and England, because the magnates of Germany allied themselves
with the papacy in Rome to preserve their feudal liberties from the
emperor.

In the mid-15th century, a group of kings in Europe, known in history
as the New Monarchs, succeeded in laying the foundation for
nation-states. The new monarchs offered the institution of monarchy as
a guarantee of law and order, against aristocratic abuse of the
bourgeoisie and the peasants who were willing to pay taxes to the king
in return for peace and protection, and to let the king dominate
parliament which had proved to be a stronghold of the aristocracy. The
new monarchies broke down the mass of inherited feudal “common
law” through which the rights of the feudal classes were
entrenched, by reinstituting Roman law, which was actively studied in
the new universities. These new monarchs proclaimed themselves as
sovereigns and required their subjects to address them as “Your
Majesty.” According to lex regia in Roman law, the sovereign
incorporates the will and the welfare of the people in his person, and
upholds the principle of salus populi suprema lex (the welfare of the
people is the highest law). The sovereign can make law, enact it by
his own authority regardless of past customs or historical liberties
by the principle of quo principi placuit legis habet vigorem (what
pleases the prince has the force of law).

The New Monarchy came to England with the dynasty of the Tudors, whose
first king, Henry VII (1485-1509), put an end to the War of the Roses,
which had greatly decimated the English baronial families. In France,
the New Monarchy was represented by Louis XI (1461-83) and his
successors. Louis XI maintained a regular royal army, no longer
dependent on aristocratic support for maintaining peace and waging
war. The French king acquired much greater authority to raise taxes
without parliament consent than the English Tudors. The Estate General
met only once in the reign of Louis XI, and on that occasion requested
the king to govern without them in the future. Over the First Estate,
the Church, the French kings asserted extensive powers.

The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 gave the Gallic Church much
independence from Rome. In 1516, King Francis I reached an agreement
with Pope Leo X, the Concordat of Bologna, rescinding the Pragmatic
Sanction, by dividing the independence with Rome receiving the
“innates” or money income from French ecclesiastics, the
king appointed the bishops and abbots. The fact that the French
monarchy controlled the Gallic church was the main reason why France
never turned Protestant.

The New Monarchy came to Spain through facilities offered by the
Church, since the kingdom of Spain did not exist before that. The
Spanish were the most tolerant of all Europeans, with Christians,
Muslims and Jews living in harmony. As the New Monarchy in Spain
followed a religious bent, achieving unification through the Church,
national feelings fused with Catholicity. With the Christian conquest
of Granada, Moors and Jews were expelled. The Inquisition hunted down
Moriscos (Christians with Moorish background) and Maranos (Christians
of Jewish background). A decree in 1492 expelling Jews followed their
expulsion from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Jews were not
allowed to return to England until the mid-17th century and to France
until after the French Revolution. The Sephardic Jews from Spain went
mostly to the Near and Middle East. The Jews who left England and
France went mostly to Germany, the great center of Ashkenazic Jewry of
the Middle Ages. Driven from Germany in the 14th century, they
concentrated in Poland until the Holocaust of the 1940s.

Ideas of the New Monarchy were also at work in the Holy Roman Empire
in Germany, with the difference that the estates in the other new
monarchies took the form of princely states, duchies, margraviats,
bishoprics and abbacies in Germany. The emperor became an elective
office by seven Electors. In 1356, the Archduke of Austria, a
Hapsburg, was elected emperor. The Hapsburgs remained the principal
power in Europe, until after the Thirty Years' War, which ended in
1648.

Protestantism, as espoused by Martin Luther (1483-1546), was
revolutionary because its doctrines held not merely that abuses in the
Church must be reformed but that the Roman Church itself, even if
perfect by its own ideals, was wrong in principle. Protestants aimed
not to restore the medieval Church from Renaissance abuses, but to
overthrow it and replace it with a church founded on principles drawn
from the Bible. Such principles should not be decreed by the Church
but by the individual believer's conscience.

This attitude against central authority was music to the German
princes, who responded positively to Luther's invitation to the
state to assume control of religion. Protestantism became entwined
with social and political revolution. Charles V, as Holy Roman
Emperor, was obliged to defend the faith because only within a
Catholic world did the Holy Roman Empire have any meaning. The
princely states within the empire saw the emperor's effort to
suppress Luther as a threat to their own freedom. The imperial free
states and the dynastic states of northern Germany insisted on ius
reformandi, the right to determine their own religion. They became
Lutheran and secularized (ie, confiscated) church properties to enrich
the secular sovereigns.

Thus Luther, in placing theological protest under the protection of
secular power politics, exploited the political aspirations of budding
German principalities in the 16th century. In return, he conveniently
provided the German princes with a theological basis for political
secession from the theocratic Holy Roman Empire.

Luther exploited the political aspirations of German princes to be
independent of the Holy Roman Emperor to bolster his theological
revolt from the Roman Catholic Church. But he came to denounce peasant
rebellions when the peasants rebelled against the Protestant German
princes. He did so even though such peasant uprisings against the
German princes claimed inspiration from the same theological ideas of
the Reformation that had motivated the revolt against the Holy Roman
Emperor by the same German princes for independence. Such radical
ideas had been advocated by Luther. However, even Luther's
professed personal sympathy for peasant demands for improved treatment
from their oppressive princes did not persuade him to endorse peasant
uprisings.

In fact, Luther could be considered a Stalinist. Or more accurately,
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1879-1953) would in fact fit the
definition of a Lutheran diehard, at least in revolutionary strategy
if not in ideological essence. Like Luther, Stalin suppressed populist
radicalism to preserve institutional revolution, and glorified the
state as the sole legitimate expeditor of revolutionary ideology.

Early Protestantism, like Stalinism, became more oppressive and
intolerant than the system it replaced. Ironically, puritanical
Protestant ethics celebrating the virtues of thrift, industry,
sobriety and responsibility, were identified by many sociologists as
the driving force centuries later behind the success of modern
capitalism and industrialized economy. Particularly, ethics as
espoused by Calvinism, which in its extreme advocated subordination of
the state to the church, diverging from Luther's view of the state
to which the church is subordinate, was ironically credited as the
spirit behind the emergence of the modern Western industrial state. In
that sense, the post-Cold War Islamic theocratic states are Calvinist
in principle.

[Publisher's note: I was unable to locate the next part on
imperialism and modernity.]